


Wake Up and Find

by Lexie



Category: You Belong With Me - University of Rochester Yellowjackets (Music Video)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexie/pseuds/Lexie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the third time that Danny wound up with a window or door directly across from Eli Gronkowski's, he had to wonder if the universe was trying to tell him something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flyingthesky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingthesky/gifts).



> With appreciation to my betas, the marvelous [minkhollow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/minkhollow), [wickedtrue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wickedtrue), and [laura47](http://archiveofourown.org/users/laura47); to Taylor Swift; and to the crew that made [the video](http://vimeo.com/17418626). Flyingthesky: I hope you weren't kidding when you said you wanted to know everything! Happy Yuletide!

Danny went to his first Cubs game when he was in diapers.

The family took two cars in case someone had to leave early with Danny, but what actually happened was that Jake (who was six) got sick after sneaking too much ice cream and Wilson (who was eight) threw a tantrum, Dad took them home in the middle of the fourth inning, and Danny slept in his mom's lap for the whole game, right through the Cubs' win in extra innings.

It was one of Mom's favorite stories. It was one of Danny's favorites as he got older, too, because he got to lord it over Jake and Wilson for being total loser wusses. Mom said she thought that was when he caught the baseball bug — hearing Harry Caray's voice filter into his dreaming mind with the roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat.

Dad said he thought Danny never stood a chance, since Wilson and Jake only had room in their hearts for college football and Mom needed a disciple.

Danny preferred Mom's explanation. He thought it was the real one.

Danny loved summers the most. That was when they pulled the tent out of the garage and set it up in the backyard, and they dug out the battery-powered radio that Mom bought when she was in high school. They always invited Dad and Wilson and Jake. Danny's brothers just wanted to watch cartoons or wrestle; Dad would raise the flap and come in for a few minutes, but he didn't get it the way that Danny and his mom did, which was okay, because Dad understood _Star Trek_ and Mom seriously didn’t.

Danny never loved his mom more than when they left the flap open and laid on their backs, half in the tent and half out of it. Mom would spread a blanket across the wet grass and they'd yell and roll around — with happiness or rage, depending on the call reported by the scratchy voices of the announcers — and make fun of the umpires. During commercial breaks, they turned down the volume of ads for local used car dealerships so that Mom could point out all the star patterns she knew. She didn't know a lot, so Danny had them all memorized by the time he was nine, but he made her go through them over and over again anyway — the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion's Belt, and the one that they both thought looked like a big clown shoe.

The crickets would make their low, steady buzz all night, and Mrs. Peebles usually showed up after killing a few chipmunks or mice so she could wind around their legs in the tent. If the game went into extra innings, Dad would come out to say it was time for bed. They'd turn down the radio and crawl into the tent with it, and Mom usually let Danny stay up to listen to the whole thing, both of them shushing each other when the disgusted yelling or the cheering started to get too loud and Dad flickered the back porch light to tell them he knew they were still up.

When it was over, they did a detailed post-game breakdown, going over all the best and worst plays. If Mrs. Peebles was outside, she meowed at the flap until they let her in, and then she crawled as far down Danny's sleeping bag as she could go. Sometimes he'd wake up and find her sleeping on his face. It was annoying but kind of nice; he liked knowing she was there, curled up with him. There was something comforting about his mom’s presence, too, hearing her breathing in the dark and knowing he could reach out if he needed her.

In the morning, before he got too big for it, Mom carried him inside and tucked him into bed when she went to work, and Danny fell asleep again until Jake ran in yelling and sat on his chest.

Danny loved summer.

Summer meant rec camp instead of being stuffed into a desk; it meant weekend trips to the lake and chasing his brothers around the yard while Dad yelled to “at least put shoes on, Jesus!” Most importantly, summer meant rec league baseball and Mom coaching his t-ball team. As much as Danny loved the game — way more than the kids who sat in the outfield and picked dandelions — what he mostly remembered about the t-ball years, later, was that they were sponsored by the local dairy freeze and they got to have ice cream after every game, win or lose.

Technically no one won or lost, because there was no official score, but Danny always kept score in his head.

* * *

When Danny was in fourth grade, two important things happened. The Arizona Diamondbacks made it to the World Series for the first time ever (which Danny could appreciate as a historic event even though he wasn’t a D-backs fan), and he brought a note home from Ms. Sun saying that birthday treats could no longer contain nuts.

"Why?" Danny asked his dad, hands balled into fists at his sides.

"I didn't know there's a new kid in your class this year," said Dad absently, flipping through the rest of the papers in Danny's folder. Danny _had_ been excited for Dad to see the 90% he got on his spelling test, but that was unimportant in the face of the tragic news that he couldn't bring in Dad's famous peanut butter cupcakes for his birthday.

"Yeah," Danny said. He shifted from foot to foot, waiting for an answer he knew wasn’t gonna come because Dad was almost worse about getting distracted than Danny was. He could hear his brothers yelling out back. "He's got a funny name. Why can't we have cupcakes?"

"Somebody's really allergic to peanuts," said Dad. He looked up and pushed the kitchen window open. "Hey!" he shouted. "Guys! Don't kill each other!"

Jake and Wilson kept fighting.

Dad sighed. "Your brothers," he said. "It's a good thing you got all the brains in the family, huh?" He shoved the brim of Danny's cap down over his eyes; Danny yelled and pushed it back up again.

"What about my birthday?"

"We'll make anything else you want, okay? Hey, look at this test, bud! Here's one for the fridge. Wait til your m— JACOB FRANCIS!"

Danny glared at the refrigerator.

* * *

Gronks was weird. His name was _Gronks_ and his family was from Kentucky and his mom hadn't moved with them and he didn't talk, except for when Ms. Sun called on him, and then he just said, "I don't know" a lot. He wore a Power Rangers sweater even though they were way too old for Power Rangers. He was really bad at kickball and he looked happy when it was raining too hard to have recess outside, and not because it meant he got to play Game Boy Advance or anything — he just sat at his desk and doodled all over his folder.

Danny saw Jennifer try to talk to Gronks one day, when she leaned over to ask for a pencil, but he just handed her the pencil and then huddled into his turtleneck. He was weird and he didn’t talk and he hated peanut butter, and that was enough for everybody. They left him alone.

Could weird people like cool stuff, though? That was the question on Danny's mind after he got a look at Gronks's folder one day during indoor recess. It was covered in explosions and ghosts and sketch after sketch of the Starfleet insignia from _Star Trek_ , like the badge that Captain Picard hit when he wanted to be beamed up to the Enterprise.

That night, Danny waited til the seventh inning stretch to ask his mom what it meant when someone was allergic to peanuts. She muted the TV, but the closed captioning kept scrolling, making it look like Joe Buck was talking about “nimble of butters worked” instead of “number of batters walked.” The closed captioning stank.

"It's no joke," Mom said. "If someone's seriously allergic, their throat can close up."

He made a face at his knees. "Why can't they just not eat peanuts?"

Mom reached for the popcorn and shot him a look. "Is this about the birthday thing again? Danno, we're not killing one of your classmates with cupcakes."

Danny jumped. He asked Mom because he knew she'd be honest, but that was scary. "He would _die_?" he asked.

"It’s possible, if people aren't careful with his food," said Mom, and then a Diamondback hit a long, long ball to center field and they threw popcorn everywhere in the rush to un-mute the TV.

Danny thought about it when he went to bed. Usually he would have stared at the posters taped to his ceiling and run through Randy Johnson’s shut-out complete game and whatever else crossed his mind til he felt sleepy, but instead, he couldn’t stop wondering about the weird new kid. _Was_ he weird? He liked cool stuff, maybe; what if he liked _Star Trek_ and believed in ghosts? Maybe he was quiet because he was scared of the school being haunted. Maybe he was scared to talk to everybody because Sal and a few others were still sneaking peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at lunch.

That was probably why he always sat alone unless the teacher on duty stepped in, Danny suddenly thought. The realization hit like a lightning bolt. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to talk to anybody — it was because if he got near Sal stuffing his face, he _could die_.

The next day, Danny sat down at Gronks's empty lunch table.

"Hi," he said. "I've got Gushers; wanna trade?"

Gronks looked surprised and kind of nervous, peering at him over the top of his glasses. ELIJAH!! was spelled out with star stickers across the top of his plastic lunch box, and someone had written GRONKOWSKI in Sharpie on the handle.

"There's no peanuts, I looked," Danny assured him. He unzipped his lunch box and pulled out his fruit snacks and the Tupperware with his ham sandwich.

"Um," said Gronks, finally. "I have Fruit by the Foot."

He furrowed his eyebrows, carefully considering the deal. “What flavor?”

“Red,” he said, like Danny was stupid. It _was_ a stupid question — it was always red — so Danny laughed. Gronks’s expression went startled, and then he began to smile.

Danny held out his package of Gushers. Gronks took it between two careful fingers and solemnly passed him the Fruit by the Foot. Danny started unrolling his prize. “I liked your folder,” he said. “Do you like _Star Trek_?”

His face lit up. “The original is my favorite, but _Deep Space Nine_ ’s okay!” he said. “I want to draw the away teams, like they look in the comic books.”

“There are comic books??” Danny asked, awed.

“Yeah.” Gronks’s little smile got bigger when Danny smiled back, and then he laughed when Danny let Fruit by the Foot hang out of his mouth like a tongue.

After school, Danny pulled Gronks over to Jake in the schoolyard and informed Jake that Danny would be going to the Gronks house to see _Star Trek_ comic books from the 1970s. Jake got way less grumpy about it when he saw that Gronks had a sister his age and she was waiting to pick up her brother, too.

“Whatever,” said Gronks’s sister Becky, when Jake and Danny stood in front of her. “Eli, let’s _go_ already.”

It took Danny a second to realize that she was talking to Gronks, whose name probably wasn’t actually Gronks, which was a thing that they’d only started calling him because nobody could remember how to say his last name.

Eli smiled shyly at him and beckoned him along, and the four of them walked to Eli and Becky’s house. Becky was scary, Danny had decided pretty much right away; she was wearing black lipstick and huge boots that made her even taller than she already was, and she seemed really mad. Listening to Jake try to impress her was funny, though. Eli thought so too.

Something about Eli and Becky’s house seemed really familiar, and Danny didn’t understand why until they were standing in Eli’s room (which was _awesome_ ; he had posters from all of the classic _Star Trek_ movies, and a PlayStation 2 and a glow-in-the-dark map, and tons of books and action figures, so much that Danny ran from cool thing to cool thing to check it all out). While Eli pulled a box out from under his bed, Danny peered out the window. The backyard was small and separated by a wooden fence from another backyard, one with a shed and a swingset and a huge oak tree with a tire swing, and...

“Hey,” he blurted, “that’s my house!”

“What?” said Eli, still under the bed.

“That’s my room!” When Eli came up to kneel on the bed beside him, his hair dusty, Danny pointed at the second-story window with the blue curtains. “You live in the house behind us!”

Eli looked out the window, and then he scrambled back under the bed and came out with a flashlight; a huge one, like the one that Dad kept in the basement for when the power went out during blizzards. Eli switched it on and held it up to the window, and then the prism hanging in Danny’s window reflected back at them. They both laughed.

“We could do morse code,” Eli said, which was like something from the Hardy Boys and was the _best idea ever_.

They tried it that night. It completely worked, as Danny grinned and flashed his light on and off, watching the small light in Eli's window do the same, and also completely didn’t work, because neither of them knew morse code.

They would Google it, they decided the next morning at school.

* * *

Mom really taught Danny to play baseball when he graduated past t-ball into the real thing: little league. They spent long hours playing catch in the backyard, strengthening Danny's arm (Mom bragged at her book club meetings that he could throw a runner out at third from right field) and working on his batting stance. There were try-outs in the middle school gym and the coach from the Rockies drafted him, which meant he got outfitted with an official red uniform, knee socks and cleats and all.

Danny loved baseball for a lot of reasons — the strategy, the tension, the excitement, hitting stuff with bats — but maybe most of all for the total focus that it required. If he zoned out or his mind wandered while he was in right field, he could wind up with a broken nose from a line drive. It was even more dangerous when he was behind the plate, where inattention meant the difference between ducking safely and getting a bat to the facemask.

It was _easy_ to focus on baseball; there was something soothing about the repetition of throw-and-catch, throw-and-catch, when he was playing with Mom or warming up at practice. The ball thumped into the webbing of his glove, he fished it out; he turned and threw it back with a step forward and a loose arm, the ball flying in a long, lazy arc, and then it started all over again. It was a series of regular, predictable steps, allowing him to turn off his brain and rely on pure athleticism. Danny loved it.

Mom tried to teach him to pitch. He wanted to, because pitching was awesome and Mom pitched when she played softball as a girl, but Danny was really bad at it. Even in their backyard, he kept hitting the Marcuccis' fence, and the shed, and Dad's vegetable garden, and sometimes his brothers, instead of the catcher's mitt.

Coach Hemingway put him in as pitcher once, just to try it, and then Danny hit three out of the seven batters he faced and walked the other four, and Coach called a time-out so Danny could put the catcher's gear on and trudge back behind the plate before the inning was even over.

"You can throw a runner out at first, but you can't get a ball across the plate without breaking the batter's face or throwing it into the woods," laughed Jake after the game, and Danny said "SHUT UP" with a rush of hot furious shame and launched himself at him, and Mom broke it up by grabbing the backs of their shirts.

"Everybody has their strengths," Mom said, later that night, while the Cubs were in a rain delay and Danny was lying in the tent with his arms folded across his chest.

"I know," he said, mulish.

"You're a great catcher, Danno. You've got a really good eye at the plate and you wait til the right pitch comes. Nobody else on your team has your patience."

"I wanted to pitch," he said. He wanted to be like Greg Maddux. He wanted to be the hero.

"I know," said Mom. "But you've got other strengths. There's no shame in that."

"I guess," said Danny, and then the game came back on, and he shied away when his mom tried to stroke his hair. He was getting way too old for that stuff.

Eli came to the next game with their friend Mo. The two of them showed up on their bikes and when Danny went up to bat, he saw them waving glittery signs ( _DANNY FOR PREZ_ and _#29, DANNY 'SLUGGER' FRANCIS!!!!_ ) and heard them cheering. Even the announcer stopped making out with his girlfriend (everybody knew what Carey Peabody’s brother was doing in the booth between calls) long enough to talk about them.

"Looks like Francis brought a fan club," he said, after announcing Danny's name. Everyone laughed — both teams, the crowd of families — but Danny didn't care; he grinned the whole way out to the plate, so wide it felt like his face might split.

Mo was chanting, "Danny, Danny, he's our man, if he can't do it, nobody can!" while his dad yelled, "C'mon, Danno!" and spectators and teammates clapped.

Danny dug his cleats into the two grooves in the dirt at home plate. He raised the bat and then ran through his mental checklist: _back elbow up, chin down, weight on right leg, choke up on the bat, stare at the pitcher like you’re Yogi Bear and he’s a picnic basket_.

The skinny pitcher looked twitchy, shaking off three signs from the catcher before finally winding up. The wall of sound from the spectators got even louder, and Danny doubled down on his checklist to prevent distraction: _elbow up, chin down, lean back, choke up, don’t look away._

"Go Danny!" Eli called, his voice cutting through the chaos as the pitcher threw, and Danny stepped in and swung. He knew it was good the second he hit it — the bat sang smooth and sweet on the follow-through, no ugly _tok!_ sound or painful jarring in his hands. He didn't wait to see where that bullet went. He dropped the bat at the end of his swing and sprinted for first base with what felt like a thousand screaming fans cheering him on.

When he was standing on third base in a cloud of dust, wiping dirt from his slide off his pant leg and sock, Danny beamed and raised his fists at his crowd of admirers.

After the game, and the sportsmanship high-fives with the losing team, he jogged over to the fence just outside the dugout. Mo and Eli were waiting, grinning, still clutching their signs.

"Danny, that was awesome," Mo declared, and she reached across the fence and hugged him. Several voices in the dugout went _ooooooh!_ ; Danny ignored them. Mo was tall and pretty with a long black ponytail that swished when she walked, and she was the best player in neighborhood games of pick-up soccer — but she was kind of out there, and anyway, Danny was pretty sure Eli had a thing for her, and liking somebody your best friend liked was against all the rules of being best friends.

Besides, Mo was a White Sox fan. 

" _You_ guys are awesome!" Danny said.

"Your mom said it was gonna be a good game," said Mo, patting him on the back as she released him. He and Eli looked at each other for a minute before Eli laughed, then Danny laughed, and then they quickly hugged over the fence too.

"You were _so_ awesome," Eli said, and Mo punched him in the shoulder. Danny didn't know what was happening there but Eli turned kind of red and shoulder-checked her back, and he figured he'd better say something before Eli completely embarrassed himself.

"I can't believe you guys made signs," he said.

"Eli said we had to," said Mo.

"All good fan clubs have signs," Eli said loyally.

They came out for post-game ice cream with the team. Half the starting line-up violently crawled all over each other to try to sit next to Mo, who twirled her ponytail between two fingers and destroyed them all with smiles over her ice cream cone.

Danny looked sympathetically at Eli, wedged into the plastic bench between Danny and the armrest, as Mo's big laugh rang out behind him. Eli froze with a spoonful of Peppermint Stick hovering in front of his mouth, and said, "What?" nervously.

Danny made an expectant face, raising his eyebrows and jerking his head in the general direction of the scene behind him, where Mo was holding court over her admirers.

Eli jerked in alarm. "Is there a bee?" he demanded, starting to wiggle but trapped between the bench and Danny's hip.

"What? _No_ ," said Danny. He lowered his voice. "Mo."

He stopped trying to escape the bench. "Oh," he said, and then he made a face. "Yeah, it's gross." A balled-up napkin bounced off his head; Mo, as usual, had eyes (in this case, ears?) in the back of her head.

Danny glanced over his shoulder but she was already laughing at a couple of the drooling infielders again. "So, you're not...?" Eli stared at him blankly, ice cream melting off his spoon, and Danny said, "Never mind."

* * *

Danny wished it could be baseball time all year but since the season only lasted from March til August, he played soccer in the fall. He wasn't the best player — he'd never make an all-star team the way he did every summer in little league — but he generally did okay. He made up for his not-great speed or skills with total willingness to do whatever the coach asked, including warming the bench a lot.

He didn't love soccer the way he loved baseball. The rules didn't make as much sense to him, and power didn't mean the same thing as it did in a game where he could drive deep for home runs and block the plate against incoming baserunners. But it was a cool way to spend the fall, and he liked all of his teammates, except for Harrison, who was ... Harrison.

There was a loud burst of cheering and he blinked back to paying attention to the game. Zach had _almost_ scored a goal, but it'd bounced off the Red Team goalie's fingertips.

"AW, COME ON!" Danny yelled, commiserating, along with the other players on the bench. Zach was standing on the pitch with his hands on his head, looking surprised.

"Time out! Guys, bring it in!" yelled Coach Hoffstader, waving them all off the field, and they came sprinting in.

Mo spit out her mouthguard. "They're killing us, Coach!" she said fiercely.

"Nobody's killing anybody," said Coach placidly, used to dealing with Mo's intensity; "we are playing for fun, Moufina, and we're just gonna try some substitutions here so everybody gets a chance to play. Ahmed, you're in for Alex; Brendon, switch with Chantal." She looked up and down the bench, and Danny made himself sit up straighter when her eyes stopped on him. "Danny," she said, "you're substituting for Moufina."

Mo made a disgusted noise (one that Danny couldn't blame her for — nobody liked being pulled out, especially Mo), but Coach talked over her. "Okay, now everybody get out there and have some fun!" she yelled, and they all yelled, "Goooo Blue Team!" together and ran back onto the field.

Danny hopped up and jogged off with them, shooting Mo a _yo! sorry!_ look as he went. She glared at him, because she was Mo. He tried to ignore it as he took up his position in the goal.

When the ref blew the whistle, a Red Team player threw the ball back in and the game devolved into immediate chaos, everybody running around chasing the ball in a big pack while the crowd of parents and friends yelled. The action was down at the other end of the field, keeping the opposing goalie on her toes, so Danny felt safe in glancing at the sidelines. Mo was still standing, her arms folded over her chest, as she argued with Coach Hoffstader. He winced and tried to work some moisture back into his guilty dry mouth. Mo had to learn to not be a crappy sport, he reminded himself, and it wasn't his fault Coach had put him in at goal.

It still didn't feel great, though, so he looked at the stands where everybody was watching the players run around the opposite goal. Danny saw Eli standing on the top bench, bouncing up and down with excitement. Danny's dad was up there somewhere, lost in a sea of parents, and he felt another sharp pang of guilt. He hadn't shown his dad his report card yet. One of the good things about Jake being in high school was that they didn't get their grades at the same time anymore, so Danny had a little extra time to figure out how to break the news that he was getting D's in social studies and math.

It was really hard sitting in a desk all day, expected to hold perfectly still and do nothing but listen. They did experiments and games and lots of different stuff in his other classes, so he mostly got by with B's and one or two C's, but math and social studies were the worst. Danny would stare at Mrs. Meyer while she droned about the political process in America and he'd start to wonder about what happened to the booths with patriotic curtains when people _weren't_ voting, and then he'd think about how old he was going to be when he got to vote for the first time, and then he would try to run through the hot lunch schedule in his head to remember whether today was sloppy joe day, and then he'd consider strategies for beating the hard level in _Katamari Damarcy_ , and suddenly he'd realize that Mrs. Meyer had been sounding like a Charlie Brown teacher, making nothing but trumpeting _wah-wah-wah-wah_ sounds, for the last twenty minutes.

It wasn't that he wasn't trying — he _was_ , he was trying really hard! But he couldn't pay attention to something that boring.

He kind of couldn't pay attention in general. Mom called him her scatter-boy, which was a pretty accurate nickname. When he got excited, sometimes it took somebody a while to figure out what he'd been talking about at first, because — so, if he was talking about the series finale of _Enterprise_ and how much it sucked, he would start out by saying how Captain Archer was no Picard or Sisko, and then he'd remember that Porthos the beagle did something cool, and how bad he'd wanted a beagle when he was like seven, and how did beagles keep their ears out of their food bowls? and whoever he was talking to would have to walk him back, tangential step by tangential step, to get to where he'd started, because Danny couldn’t always remember. Eli and Aunt Kayleigh especially were really good at following his leaps and getting him back to what he'd originally been talking about without making Danny feel stupid or embarrassed. It was awesome.

Danny looked up into the stands.

The soccer ball hit him in the side of the face.

Later, after the trip to the emergency room and the explaining and the truth about his report card, Danny sat on the front steps with an ice pack and with Dad, and mostly nodded a lot while Dad said stuff about talking to the counselor and helping him finish homework assignments, and getting tested for ADD. Dad said it wouldn’t be a bad thing and the family wanted to make sure they were doing everything to help him that they could, and that they loved him very much no matter what.

Danny was 12, which was probably too old to hide your face in your dad’s shoulder and still be cool, but he leaned over and did it anyway.

* * *

On a Friday night in eighth grade, Eli flickered a flashlight SOS at Danny’s window, then followed it up with _CHRISTMAS_ and _BECKY??_.

On Saturday, they pestered Wilson into driving them to the mall.

“What about this?” Danny asked, holding a girl-sized ‘VOTE FOR PEDRO’ T-shirt up against his own chest. “Everybody loves _Napoleon Dynamite_.”

Eli grimaced at him across the clothing rack, and Danny was pretty sure he caught the sales clerk rolling her eyes behind the counter. “Not _everybody_ ,” he said, flicking through T-shirts with clicks of the hangers. “Definitely not Becky.”

Danny shifted his weight and tried not to feel too weird about the fact that he was standing in a Hot Topic and they were broadcasting some kind of screaming over the sound system. There was overwhelming dissonance between what Hot Topic was playing and the distant sounds of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” coming from the rest of the mall. “What _does_ your sister like?”

“Nothing,” Eli said darkly. “No, not nothing — anger, creepy-cute stuff, being the worst.” With every suggestion, he loudly flicked a hanger.

“So...” A display caught Danny’s eye. “Tim Burton movies?”

Eli’s head rose above the rack of T-shirts so suddenly that he looked like something out of Whack-a-Mole (something out of Whack-a-Mole wearing glasses and a hat with ear flaps). Danny laughed and pointed to the big _Corpse Bride_ display in the front window. “YES,” said Eli, and in short order, they left the store with another bag added to their haul.

“Who’s left on your list?” Eli asked as they ducked around a group of moms with strollers.

“Just Wilson,” said Danny. No matter how hard Danny tried to avoid the shoppers passing them, he was getting buffeted by shopping bags from all directions. The mall on the weekend before Christmas was bad news bears. They passed the incredible cloud of perfume/cologne exploding out of Abercrombie & Fitch, and he wrinkled his nose and tried not to cough. “I don’t know what to get him. A new calculator? A pocket protector — do they make pocket protectors?”

“I think only in eighties movies about nerds,” said Eli.

“Hey, what time is it?”

Eli shoved back the sleeve of his parka to check his watch. “Three.” While he was still looking at his watch and not paying attention to where he was going, Danny grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the path of a couple of oncoming kids just in time.

“Can we make a pit stop?” Danny said, eyeing the food court up ahead.

“I’m starving!” Eli yanked his arm away and bolted for Sbarro before Danny could say a word.

By the time they settled in at a table with their pile of bags and two slices of pizza, whatever had gotten Eli all squirrely was apparently over; he was eating his pizza and getting grease all over the place like usual. Danny shoved a stack of napkins at him and dug into his coat pocket for the pill bottle that had been rattling around all afternoon.

Eli watched as Danny shook two pills out and swallowed them with the bottle of water he’d grabbed from a vending machine.

“Can I ask you something?” Eli said. “It might be stupid. It’s probably stupid.”

“Sure,” said Danny through a mouthful of crust and lukewarm stringy cheese.

“Do those make a huge difference?”

Danny blinked. He chewed and swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”

“What’s it like?”

He put down the greasy slice of pizza, grabbing a napkin and wiping his fingers while he thought about it. “It sucked at first, when they were trying to figure out the right one and the right dose,” he said, and Eli nodded several times. “But even then, it was like — all this time, there was all this _noise_ ,” he gestured with both hands around his head, “in my head, and I didn’t really know it was there til it was suddenly gone. I can concentrate on stuff without having to do, like, six things at once and forgetting half of them.” He let his hands fall to the table and he picked up the pizza again. It was floppy thanks to soggy dough, and after a second of staring at it, he gave up and just folded the slice in half. “It’s awesome.”

Eli nodded again, serious. There was a smudge of grease on his glasses. 

"I'm really glad my parents figured it out."

"Yeah, too bad you had to put your face in front of a soccer ball first," said Eli, and Danny laughed. "They were cool about it, right? Like ... you getting diagnosed and everything."

"Of course they were," Danny said with a cheerful scoff, but something weirdly hesitant in Eli's face made him add, "My dad said they love me no matter what, yeah." There was a commotion behind them. When he glanced over, it was just two ladies who'd bumped into each other with their bags. He turned back, and Eli was furiously scrubbing something off his glasses, probably pizza grease. "I think they mostly felt bad they didn't have me get tested before." 

"Yeah," said Eli, quiet, and then Isaac Washington said, " 'Sup losers!" and sat down at their table so hard that it almost vibrated Danny's paper plate right off the table. He offered his hand, and, after ten awkward seconds, Danny gave him a weirded-out high-five. 

Isaac snorted and dropped a Sears bag on the table, almost right on top of Eli's pizza. "It's okay, we're gonna get it next time. Social studies, tomorrow: be there."

"Yeah, okay," said Danny.

Isaac slumped down in his chair, knees spread wide. He toed at one of their bags on the floor when his sneaker caught it. "Hot Topic? Seriously?" He laughed and stole a mushroom off Danny's pizza. "I bet that's _yours_ , huh?" Isaac pointed at Eli with the mushroom before popping it in his mouth.

Danny glanced at Eli, who'd been sitting quietly ever since Isaac joined them and now was stiffly leaning over the table, picking pepperonis off his pizza. He wasn't looking up. Danny felt his jaw set. "Hey." He glared. "Don't be a jerk."

"Whatever whatever," said Isaac easily. "You should come hang out with me and Mike sometime if you wanna have some actual fun, Dan."

"Dude, _shut up_ ; you don't even know what you're talking about," Danny called as Isaac got up, dragged his shopping bag off the table, and headed toward the Chinese takeout kiosk. Isaac shoved Danny's head and gave him the finger on the way, so clearly he hadn't taken Danny's warning very seriously.

Danny looked across the table. "He's a douchebag; ignore him."

"It's okay," Eli said. Danny wasn't sure at first if he bought that, but then Eli added, "Thanks" and started to smile at him, and it was hard not to believe that smile.


	2. Chapter 2

“Wow,” Danny said. “So this is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I know, right?” said Eli, pulling a distasteful face down at their table. Across the lab, somebody shrieked, and Danny looked up in time to see Harrison and Isaac chasing Meghan with their earthworm while she tried to duck away. Danny frowned despite his instinctive shudder and stood up from his lean against the lab table, but before he could take a step, Mr. G crossed the lab and started raising holy hell.

“ ‘Examine your earthworm and determine the dorsal and ventral sides. Locate the two openings on the ventral surface of the earthworm,’ ” Eli read off the worksheet, and he prodded at their worm with the needle. Its skin moved. Danny suddenly felt acutely nauseous. “So these are the sperm ducts, and these are the genital … something I can’t pronounce. What if we just labelled them ‘the sexy bits’?”

Danny laughed a little bit, quiet and uneasy, as Eli ticked the appropriate boxes on the worksheet. He watched the next table, where Chantal and a couple other girls were laughing as they filled out their worksheets.

“The ‘dark line that runs down the dorsal side’ — that’s apparently the dorsal blood vessel, right there,” said Eli. “ ‘Locate the worm’s mouth and anus.’ ” He wrinkled his nose again, leaning in over their dissecting pan and squinting at their dead worm. “Do you see its butt anywhere?”

Danny had been trying really, really hard not to look at it, but now that he had been asked a direct question, he took a deep breath and leaned in. The worm was glossy and fat and brown and he did not want to get any closer to it. “No,” he said.

“Don’t worry, found it!” said Eli, labeling the appropriate parts on their diagram. “Here, you start the surgery.” Without looking up from the sketch he was making, he offered Danny the scissors. Danny somehow felt hot and clammy at the same time. He took the scissors. “It’s already dorsal side up in the pan; you just have to stick the scissors in a couple centimeters above that swelly part and then cut through the skin all the way up to the head.”

He managed to follow instructions and hold it together, somehow, until Eli started pulling skin away from organs and pinning it back against the pan. When he peeled and pinned the first translucent skin segment, Danny’s ears roared, his vision blurred, and his knees went shaky, all at once.

“Whoa,” he said, clutching the edge of the lab table, hard, and something scraped along the floor and then Eli was pushing him to sit down on the stool that wasn’t there a minute ago. Danny shut his eyes.

“Danny?” said Eli’s voice, very close to him. His hand was still on Danny’s shoulder, fingers clenching and un-clenching. “I’m gonna get Mr. G, hang on—”

“No! I’m okay!” Danny insisted through gritted teeth, forcing himself to breathe deep through his nose and exhale through his mouth. “Just a sec.” If Eli told Mr. G, Mr. G was gonna make a big deal out of it, and it was going to create a lot of hassle for everybody. "Don't tell Mr. G."

Danny didn’t really want the entire class to know he almost fainted, either, and he didn't want Isaac and Harrison to torment him with worms for the rest of their lives.

When he opened his eyes, Eli was sitting beside him, staring at him. “I think throwing up on our specimen probably counts as an automatic fail,” Eli said in a clearly-worried joke, and Danny smiled weakly.

“I won’t,” he said. “I don’t think.”

“Are you okay?”

“I feel better.” His smile grew a little stronger after he dared to glance at the table and saw that Eli had thrown a napkin over their dissecting pan. “I just had a—”

“What’s up, ladies?” said Mike, strolling up with his dissecting pan tucked under his arm.

Eli hunched his shoulders and stared down at their worksheet. Mr. G, Danny saw, was across the room dealing with a table of Mo’s friends who were doing … God, he didn’t even _know_ what they were doing to that worm. He swallowed a fresh round of nausea, focusing on tapping his toe against the table leg. If he studied his sneaker, he wasn't thinking about the way that the worm's skin glistened and what it had looked like spread open.

“—ing the work we got assigned,” Danny suddenly realized Eli was saying. “Not failing. Why, what’re _you_ doing?” Danny raised his head. Mike looked almost as startled as Danny felt, at Eli turning on someone instead of turtling in on himself. He stared.

“Come on, let us get our A here,” Eli finished without giving Mike a chance to speak, and then he turned his back on him and whipped the napkin off their pan. He pushed the worksheet and pen over to Danny. “Danny, you can write down that we found the septa.”

Danny picked up the pen and obediently wrote ‘septa’ under the first blank space he saw.

He heard Mike scoff and then his footsteps move away.

Danny’s rush of relief and warmth and weird pride was overwhelming; he grinned at Eli, admiring and enormous, with everything in him. “Dude, you’re the _best_.”

Eli beamed at him with his whole face. “Can you give me instructions and take notes without dying?” he asked, and when Danny nodded, Eli shot him two thumbs up.

They walked home together after school, taking turns kicking a rock so it flew across the sidewalk ahead of them. Danny tucked his hands under his backpack straps. “So, wait, you just throw Liquid Snake off the platform and bam, that’s it, you beat the whole level?” he said, and when Eli nodded, he exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”

“I know!” said Eli, dancing a little jig in the gravel.

“You’ve gotta show me that.” Danny turned his face up against the sun's warmth, smiling. Not a cloud in the sky. “As soon as we do the lab report.”

Eli stopped jigging. “Oh." He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m going home, actually; can we do it later?” Danny turned to stare at him. A car drove past. Eli visibly squirmed under the stare. “My dad lost his job yesterday—”

Danny sucked in a startled breath.

“So I thought, you know, he’s home, and if he had someone to talk to besides Satan...”

“Yeah!” said Danny, nodding furiously. “Becky’s probably not the best, after something like — that.”

“Yeah.” Eli rolled his eyes, which Danny knew was directed at his sister and her idea of tact. He kicked the rock and it clanged against the street sign post. They stopped there on the sidewalk, where Danny would keep walking straight to go home and Eli would turn left. “But I think he’s, like, going out with some of his old coworkers around seven, so I can come over then? If he actually goes.”

“Yeah, totally, totally,” said Danny, and they fist-bumped.

Isaac texted at dinner time to say that they were having an emergency soccer team bonding session and all freshmeat needed to be there IMMEDIATELY!!! so Danny laced up his sneakers, shoved his phone in his pocket without checking his battery, and bolted out the door.

When he got home after 9:30, Mom said, "Eli was here looking for you earlier." She shot Danny a steady look over the top of her newspaper. "I think he sat at the back door for a while before any of us got home."

"Shit," said Danny, then hurriedly self-corrected at Mom's raised eyebrows. "I mean crap! Crap, crap." He tripped upstairs to his room, but when he looked out the window, Eli's shade was drawn and his room was dark behind it. Danny plugged in his phone and texted three profuse apologies in a row.

In the morning, Danny fell into step beside Eli, lunch tray in hand. “Eli! I'm really sorry about last night; we had an emergency soccer meeting and my phone was dead."

"It's okay," Eli said, shrugging.

"You hung out with your dad, right? How’s he doing?”

“Fine,” said Eli, and then he went and sat with the band kids.

* * *

"What're you gonna do about homecoming?" Eli asked. They used to spend rainy afternoons lying shoulder to shoulder on Danny's bed, arguing about what to do, but lately, Eli had started preferring the floor. Probably because Danny's shoulders were getting too big for them to comfortably share, Danny figured. Eli was sprawled across the carpet like a starfish now, arms and legs flung in every distance, using his balled-up hoodie as a pillow. 

"I dunno," Danny said, tossing a baseball at his ceiling repeatedly, throw and catch, throw and catch. "Ask Moufina."

"You don't know or you're gonna ask Mo?"

"I'm gonna ask Mo," said Danny, baseball smacking into his palm. He lobbed it up again. "I think she'll say yes." He caught the ball and looked over at Eli in a sudden fit of worry. "Right?"

"Yeah," said Eli. He nodded. "Yes. Definitely. Do you like her?"

Danny let himself grin. "Yeah," he said. "She's awesome. I mean, she's scary but it's hot scary. Maybe she'll be my girlfriend." He dreamily stared at the baseball in his hand. Maybe she'd let him touch her ass.

"Cool," said Eli. "Yeah, she's the best."

Danny looked over at him. He was staring at the ceiling. "You should ask Sam," he said.

Eli made a choked noise. "— _Sam_?"

"What's your problem with Sam?" he laughed. "She's cute."

"Oh. Sam Angelidis," he said, still with a funny tone.

"Obviously. She's Mo's best friend." He tossed the ball again. "Girls move in packs. She'll totally go. Jake said he'll drive us to Ihop afterward."

"Wow. You're still hiding his weed?"

"I'm not hiding it; I'm just not telling Mom about it," Danny said, and then he grinned. "With great power comes great chauffeuring."

"You know, blackmail is illegal," Eli said, and he sputtered when Danny hit him in the face with a pillow. He rolled over and then shoved his face in it.

"Dude, come on," Danny said, knowing Eli-evasion when he saw it. "Ask Sam."

"No," he said into the pillow, which was weird enough that Danny almost dropped the baseball on his own nose instead of catching it. Eli never said no, and definitely not like that — determined and sharp, like he was mad. Danny'd been expecting to be given a million neurotic reasons why Eli couldn't talk to girls, not a plain old no.

"Why?" he said. "I know you get freaked by this stuff, but she'd be cool."

"She's fine," Eli said shortly, like that was the end of it.

"Seriously, do you need to, like, practice what you're gonna say or something?" Danny was only half-kidding as he pushed himself up on an elbow and gestured between the two of them. “I’ll be Sam!”

"NO," Eli said. He still hadn't lifted his head from the pillow. Danny frowned. Sure, Danny hadn't ever had a girlfriend either (unless you counted when Chantal Perkins was his 'girlfriend' in the middle school way where their friends set them up and they never spoke to each other), but he was pretty good at talking to girls and they usually liked him, so he didn't get where Eli's objections were coming from. Something about this didn't seem right; it somehow felt like more than Eli's usual dramatics. 

"Dude," he said, actually kind of wounded. "I'm just trying to help."

Eli sighed and tipped his head to the side on the pillow to look at him. "I know," he said. "I just don't want to go to homecoming with Sam Angelidis."

"Fine!" said Danny. "Who do you want to go with?"

He was quiet for too long before he said: "No one."

"You _like_ somebody," Danny said, grinning with the realization. The look of horror on Eli's face was a little insulting (come on, they were bros! bros trusted bros!) but mostly hilarious. "Who is it?"

"I don't like anybody," Eli said. "I hate everyone."

Danny laughed and rolled off the bed to grab him in a headlock. "Don't be a loser," Danny said, easily trapping Eli's head in his armpit while he kicked and fought. Eli was much better at the whole roughhousing thing than he was when they were nine, after years spent around the dreaded Francis brothers, but Danny had a lifetime of experience and at least four inches on him after his summer growth spurt. "Who is it? C'mon, I told you about Mo."

"Stop it," said Eli through audibly gritted teeth.

"It's Kristin Madekwe, right? You totally want to have her nerd babies."

"DANNY," Eli said, harsh and strange, and Danny immediately loosened his grip. He looked down and found Eli red-faced and miserable-looking.

"Hey," said Jake from the doorway. "Dumbasses. Eli's dad called; it's time to go home."

"—What?" Danny said, lowering his arm away from Eli's head. Eli immediately lurched to his feet.

"Okay yeah see you later," he said, and he grabbed his backpack by one strap and bolted before Danny was even sitting all the way up on his knees. Jake stepped out of Eli's way, then back into the doorway again.

Danny stared at his brother.

The back door slammed.

"I didn't hear the phone ring," he said. Eli's dad never called him home. Eli got to stay until ten o'clock on school nights, since Chris knew he'd eat dinner and come home with his homework done.

"Don't be a dick to Eli," said Jake. "He's okay for a weirdo. I like him a lot more than I like you right now, Benedict fucking Arnold."

Danny frowned. "I wasn't being a dick to Eli," he said. Jake shot him a condescending _really_? look as he turned back into the hallway. "Was I?" he asked his empty room, suddenly unsure.

By the time school was halfway over on Tuesday, Danny's initial half-baked suspicion that Eli was avoiding him felt very, very proved. He finally managed to corner him in gym, where a bunch of kids usually chose to walk around the track — half-heartedly jogging whenever Coach Carter came within yelling distance — instead of playing whatever game Coach had organized that day. For Eli, it was for the best, probably; maybe it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but game balls of all types were like Gronkowski-face-seeking missiles.

"Francis!" hollered Harrison, soccer ball under his arm on his way up to the field, "hurry up!" and then he yelled, "What? Why!" after Danny waved him off and fell into step beside Eli on the track. Danny ignored Harrison. That was usually the best thing to do.

Eli didn't say anything to him. He actually started jogging, which told Danny just how bad the situation was.

Danny scrambled after him and said, "I'm sorry."

Eli shot him an unexpected _weird_ look, almost like he was confused.

"I shouldn't have bugged you about Sam."

" _That_?" said Eli dismissively. "Whatever." Before Danny could get his surprise handled, Eli squared his shoulders and added, "I didn’t like that. But I was over it, like, five minutes later."

"Really?" asked Danny. Eli made this face, like ' _Yes_ , really; what kind of person do you think I am?' and, with a glance toward the soccer game now in full swing and no Coach in sight, he dropped into a walk. Danny followed his lead, swinging his arms a little to release some of the nervous energy of his relief. Eli wasn't pissed at him!

Eli wasn't pissed at him.

If Eli wasn't pissed at him, what had been happening all day?

"That's awesome," Danny said, "and I’m really sorry about the Sam thing, seriously, but if you're over it, what's your deal today?"

"Deal?" said Eli, his voice rising. His next few steps were this awkward hop-skip. "What deal — _no_ deal? Ha ha ha, ha ha, ha, my dad loves that show!"

Danny looked at him, steady, and Eli only met his eyes for a second or two before turning away to stare up at the stands as they walked past. A couple of girls were lying between rows with their feet up on the benches. All Eli could see of them were ankles and several pairs of mangled Converse sneakers, which probably meant it was Mo and her friends sneaking cigarettes again.

No, crap, focus. He shot Eli a judgmental look. "Seriously? Fine. This," he said, miming double-barreled finger guns in his point at Eli, "and you've been all weird all day. You worked with MacKenzie in bio—"

"She really understands the inner feelings of the earthworm—"

"Low blow!" Danny protested. "Where did you even eat lunch?"

"On the floor, with the band kids." Eli kicked a rock. It skittered across the track and flew into the grass. "We ... needed to work on team spirit?" His hair was in his face so it was hard to see his expression, but it sounded like he was wincing, like even he knew that was a crappy excuse.

"Dude, why are you avoiding me? I had to dissect with _Harrison_. Did I do something bad?"

" _No_ ," said Eli, turning toward him quickly. He looked upset. "No. You're fine. You're great — run." He broke into a shambling jog. Startled, Danny glanced up at the soccer pitch and saw Coach standing at the edge of the field, glaring down at them.

Danny ran after Eli.

"You're perfect," Eli said when he caught up. "—I mean, no, you’re — you’re fine, and I, uh, I'm sorry I ditched you in bio."

"Okay," said Danny, guarded.

"It doesn't have anything to do with you. I don't wanna talk about it."

"Uhh," he said slowly, wheedling, "I mean, you were _avoiding_ me, though, so it kinda does ... have to do with me," and Eli smiled like he was trying not to but couldn't help it, which was what Danny had wanted.

"I was avoiding you because I don't wanna talk about it and you'd make me."

"Dude, I wouldn't make you!" Danny protested, and then caved almost immediately under Eli's stink-eye. "Okay. I'm still sorry about the headlock. But I wouldn't!"

"I know, it's just this thing, with your face," Eli made a sharp gesture with his whole hand, encompassing his own face, "I can't not— anyway, whatever."

"Yeah. Whatever." There was an awkward pause. "So."

"So...” Eli echoed. “Is Mr. Carter watching?"

Danny chanced a glance up at the soccer field. Coach was still looming. "Yep."

"How do you do this all the time? I’m running in circles. It's pointless. It's like a human version of a hamster ball."

"It's easier when you're not complaining the whole time."

"The complaining makes me run faster," Eli said breathlessly, and Danny laughed.

Despite the laugh, he could feel his brain going into overdrive as they rounded the curve of the track side by side. What could be _so bad_ that Eli wouldn’t talk about it? They talked about everything. With every pounding step he took, Danny pictured more lurid scenarios — cancer, death, dismemberment, and one particularly disturbing mental image that was definitely inspired by the four George Romero movies they'd watched last weekend.

Danny cleared his dry throat. "So." Eli glanced over at him. "Look, I'm not gonna ask," he said, lifting his hands in preemptive self-defense as he ran, "because you don't want to talk and that's cool, but is everything okay? At least?"

"Yeah," said Eli.

"Okay," said Danny.

They jogged another half an awkward lap.

"My dad said we might move back to Kentucky," said Eli, and Danny froze in his tracks so suddenly that he almost tripped over himself.

Eli went on for a few more steps, then looked back at him, then stopped. He tightened his mouth. "If he doesn't get a job before next month, we're gonna go stay with my grandparents."

Danny felt his stomach lurch. He couldn’t imagine a life without flashlight morse code, a bio partner, classic horror movie marathons, dancing around to Shakira in the backseat til Jake yelled that if they didn't stop that RIGHT NOW he swore to God he was gonna crash the car— "Do you want to go?" he asked, swallowing his first couple of reactions.

"No," Eli said, right away. "I hate Louisville. My grandparents' house smells like cheese. I don't want to leave — we haven't even seen _Diary of the Dead_ yet!"

"But your dad might still get a job, right? And then you'll stay."

"Yeah." Eli pulled at his sleeve. "Maybe."

The Gronkowskis moved in November, just before the first big snowfall of the year.

The night after Thanksgiving, Danny kicked a soccer ball up the stairs (his dad yelled, "NO BALLS IN THE HOUSE!" and either Jake or Wilson laughed) and down the hall into his room. Out the window, he saw Eli's shades open, and he laughed and grabbed his flashlight off the desk. He'd already beamed it at the window before he remembered.

He slowly let the flashlight lower in his hand, til the light was pooling on the floor right in front of his feet. He switched it off.

Danny dropped the flashlight on the floor and kicked it under his desk.

* * *

The first couple months that Eli was gone were the hardest. Danny just kept forgetting, so he’d wake up to snow and pick up his phone to see if Eli had texted to say there was no school; or he’d wonder when Eli was coming back from the bathroom, while listening to Harrison talk about how many “chicks” he wanted to “ba- _bang!_ ” as he butchered an earthworm; or Danny would see a suggested movie pop up on Netflix and think about how Eli would like it.

It wasn’t like Eli was _dead_ — they both got Facebook accounts when it opened up to high school students, and they had cell phones, and Eli expressed a determination to write actual letters in the actual mail that only lasted for about two weeks because they were both lazy. They watched _Wrath of Khan_ while IMing ( _ricardo montalban’s chest looks like my sister’s ken dolls, it’s fantastic_ ; _KHAAAAAAAAN! / KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! / lol jinx_ ; _WAIT PAUSE PASUE POPCORN EMERGENCY_ ) and Eli reported back on what variety of cheese his grandparents’ house smelled like that day.

But it wasn’t the same.

Eli joined the debate team and the volunteering club at his new school in Louisville and was suddenly busy all the time, and then before Danny knew it, it was early spring and the high school baseball season was starting. When Danny remembered to check Eli’s Facebook, he’d find all these jokes he didn’t understand and comments from kids he didn’t know. In March, Eli posted a rant about Big Brother and deleted his Facebook altogether.

By June, when Danny got a summer job groundskeeping at the golf course and the first of his friends to turn 16 got a driver’s license, he and Eli were emailing once every couple months.

Early sophomore year, Danny leaned over to Kristin Madekwe in third-period Anatomy & Physiology and said, “If you want a lab partner who takes awesome notes and who’ll let you do all the gross stuff, I’m your guy,” and she said, “YES!” and gave him a high five. 

Kristin was awesomely nerdy and enthusiastic about the stuff she was into (stuff like: dissecting cats, which was somehow both scary and adorable). She worked at the multiplex, so she'd let him walk past the ticket counter without paying and then she would sneak in and make out with him in the dark theater through her whole break.

Danny liked all of it — the hand-holding, the dates, texting under desks in class, dancing at winter ball, studying together, almost falling off the bed (and then laughing together for at least ten minutes) while trying to have sex in Kristin’s room in the afternoons before her mom got home from work... All of it.

Kristin didn't like to drink but she didn't mind being around it, so she was always the designated driver when they all went to Sara Hardy's aunt's lakeside cabin in the summer. Danny got drunk enough to be hungover once and only once; after that, he was happy to sit by the bonfire with Kristin under his arm and drink one beer while they laughed at their friends making asses of themselves. Sometimes literally — there was a _lot_ of nudity.

Danny liked high school. He knew everybody, his friends were hilarious, his girlfriend was great, he was the baseball team’s starting catcher and a captain of the soccer team, he got good grades, he had a hand-me-down 1998 Honda Accord, and his family was awesome. He was a pretty simple guy, he figured — that worked for him.

Kristin got into Stanford in January of Danny’s junior year.

Kristin also got into Yale, UChicago, UPenn, Brown, UCLA, and MIT, but they all knew where she was going.

They finally finished their slow, amiable break-up the same week that the baseball team capped off an undefeated season by playing in the state championship.

The worst of Danny's nerves fell away as he strapped on his gear. When he fitted the chest protector, the twitch that had dogged him all day started to fade. When he clapped on his shin guards and tugged the straps a couple times to test them, his hands were steady. By the time he started warming up the starting pitcher, he felt cool and calm and ready; nothing like the nervous live wires that they'd all been during the last game of the regular season, when they knew they had to win one more time to make the record books. They got this, Danny knew; they got this, he told himself when he came up to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning with the game on the line.

Danny glanced out to the mound, where the pitcher was shaking mosquitoes away from his face with his glove. Behind him, Sam Hutton stood on second base, bent low and ready to run, and he shot Danny a thumbs up then thunked himself on the helmet. Danny used the bat to tap caked dirt off one cleat, then the other. His teammates were chanting something in the dugout and there was the occasional shout from the spectators ringing the backstop and the first and third baselines, but Danny tuned it all out as he stepped up to the plate.

His pre-batting rituals hadn't changed much from when he was nine. _Tap rope bracelet for luck, step in, dig your cleats in, elbow up, chin down, lean back, choke up, glare like hell._ The battered cloth of the wrapped bat handle was rough under his hands. The crowd went quiet. The flood lights buzzed overhead and the catcher's gear squeaked as the guy shifted behind him. Danny kept his eye on the ball.

The first pitch came in high. He let it go.

The second was just off the plate, Danny thought, but the ump called, "STRIKE!"

"It's okay, it's okay!" they were yelling in the dugout.

Danny knew he was going to swing the second that the ball left the pitcher's hand for the third time. It was a meatball, slow and steady right across the center of the plate. It was a mistake: a game-ending one. Danny swung on it and belted it into left center field.

By the time he rounded first base, the rest of the team had already greeted the winning run at the plate and were pouring onto the field. It didn't really hit home til Sam reached him and pounded his helmet so hard that Danny's ears started ringing. Then he was swarmed by jumping, yelling, swearing teammates, and Danny finally let himself start to grin.

Once he'd managed to escape the horde, his ribs hurting from laughter (and a couple bear hugs that had lifted him off the ground), and after they'd high-fived the Hersey High players and dumped the traditional cooler of Gatorade all over Coach's head, Danny found his parents on the edge of the field. He caught a quick glimpse of Dad smiling at him and then Mom hit him like a freight train. Danny grinned against her hair and hugged her back. 

"Good eye, Danno," Mom said.

It was still the best night of Danny’s life, being carried on the team’s shoulders and then getting interviewed for the paper and everything (he told the reporter that the season's success came from how well all the guys worked together and gelled as a team, which was the truth), but he felt the hole where Kristin used to be. The drive to the cabin to celebrate wasn't the same with a car full of yelling teammates for carpool buddies instead of Kristin, but three relief pitchers got him drunk enough that it didn't hurt anymore and he wound up making out with Harrison in the coat closet at the end of the night.

They were both still a little drunk at that point in the festivities, Danny could tell, but he wasn't nearly drunk enough for the alcohol to be clouding his judgment and he didn't think Harrison was either. He made a _choice_ to reciprocate the barrage of unexpected flirting all night long, and another choice to drag Harrison in with a bunch of coats that smelled like moth balls, and then kiss him til they were both clearly about ten seconds from embarrassing themselves.

Every time somebody opened the door to see if they were still going at it, Danny or Harrison (or Danny _and_ Harrison) told them to fuck off and pulled the door shut again.

"The pictures are probably going on Facebook right now," Danny pointed out after the last interruption of gigglers. He said it against Harrison's throat. Beyond the dark, muffled world of the coat closet, something shattered and a girl yelled, "MY BAD!"

"Eh," said Harrison, reeling Danny all the way in again with both hands on his waist, "chicks dig it," and then he groaned, " _bro_ " when Danny gave him a hickey.

Danny didn't personally care if girls liked it (well, okay, maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing, but the point was: it wasn't his driving motivation). Harrison was the proof to a two-year-old unspoken hypothesis, warm and responsive under his hands, and — incredibly, given that this was _Harrison_ — both generous and a very good kisser.

The pictures did go up in the party’s Facebook album, set to friends-only by some kind soul. Even more predictably, they started an online firestorm. It seemed like half the junior and senior classes left comments — mostly bad jokes, cheerful shock, or "whooooooo"s and "GET IT GET IT"s. Kristin said _lookin' good boys ;)_ and after a couple other girls left similar comments, Danny had to fend off multiple photoshoot proposals from Harrison, who bounced on his toes and called him "broseph" approximately five million times in the course of five minutes, as usual.

Danny had to patiently say "I'm not gay; I still like girls too" a bunch of times and some of the guys were weird in the locker room for a few weeks afterward, but that was pretty much as bad as the backlash got. If anyone had anything really negative to say, they weren't willing to say it to Danny Francis’s face.

The worst of it was probably his family.

Because Jake was a dick, he waited til the whole Francis family was sitting down at the dinner table one night, and then he sing-songed, “So, Danny, what’s new with yooou?”

Danny looked sharply across the table. Jake was grinning at him, which meant nothing good. “Uh, not much,” he said. “Getting ready to start working at the golf course again. Finals.”

“It _looked_ like you were being really studious, on Facebook,” said Jake.

“Oh?” said Mom, but it was an absent ‘oh,’ and she didn’t turn away from her conversation with Dad. “Really, Craig? They think that jackass is going to be able to handle your department?”

“Studious, that’s me,” said Danny, and then he tried to kick Jake's kneecap under the table. He hit something that he was pretty sure was a chair leg.

Wilson was glancing between the two of them. Danny couldn’t tell what he was thinking — Wilson had just gotten home from a year of grad school in New York, but they _were_ Facebook friends. Not for the first time, Danny wished Wilson didn’t have such an incredible poker face.

“Is that what they’re calling it, these days?” Jake asked blithely. “Study buddies?”

Danny stuffed an enormous forkful of meatloaf in his mouth.

“Jake, shut up,” said Wilson, placid and low, and Danny was still stuck with meatloaf-cheeks so he couldn’t smile, but he did his best to telegraph desperate gratitude with his eyes while he chewed.

“I’m just saying, Danny’s attention to his _studies_ is totally admirable.”

“Jake,” Wilson said sharply, and then Dad said, “What’s all the whispering about, boys?”

Danny automatically straightened up in his seat. “Nobody’s whispering,” he said. He could feel himself teetering on the edge of mortification. “It’s nothing.”

“Really?” said Jake. “So that tongue—”

Danny did the only thing he could think of. “Jake’s been smoking pot behind the shed for three years!”

Jake gaped at him for a half a second, and then he shot back, “Danny got drunk and made out with Harrison Fletcher last weekend!”

They both glared across the table, Danny’s face burning.

Dad cleared his throat in the silence. Wilson said, quiet but distinct, “You’re a douchebag.” Danny wasn’t sure which one of them he was talking to, til he peeked and saw Wilson looking at Jake.

“He started it,” defended Jake.

“Guys,” said Dad. “Let’s be grownups here.” Danny slowly, reluctantly glanced toward the head of the table. Dad looked serious; Mom looked, in that subtle Mom way, like she might have been struggling not to smile.

“First things first,” said Mom, her mouth-twitch under control now. “Danny, are you dating Harrison?”

“ _No_ ,” said Danny. “He’s straight.”

“And a tool,” Jake muttered, and Wilson punched his shoulder, hard.

Mom ignored them both. “And you’re not?” The question was pure Mom — matter-of-fact and straightforward, not an ounce of judgment.

“Straight? No,” Danny said, feeling his face flush even hotter. He didn’t want to talk about boys _or_ girls with his parents, and he especially didn’t want to sit at the dinner table and have a Family Discussion around somebody’s tongue having been in his mouth.

He fiddled with his fork while maintaining eye contact. He jiggled his leg under the table. “I’m bi.”

Mom nodded. “Okay,” she said, calm. “Thank you for telling us.” Dad shot him a thumbs up from over Mom’s shoulder, and Danny let himself smile at them, a little bit. “And the drinking?”

He winced, which was apparently all the answer his parents needed.

“Grounded, Danno,” said Mom, and he sighed and shrugged in acceptance — he’d known that was coming. “Jake—”

Danny looked across the table for the first time in a minute or two and found his brother staring at him, his mouth hanging open. It took a long second before Jake turned to look at Mom.

“—Car privileges.”

“And we’re having a talk about the booze and the weed later,” added Dad.

“They should wash the dishes, too,” said Wilson helpfully, and he clapped Danny on the shoulder when he got up for another serving of potatoes.

“Hey,” said Jake after dinner, when they’d been up to their elbows in soapy water and mulish silence for a while. “I’m really sorry I said that stuff.” Danny glanced at him. “I didn’t know you were actually kinda gay; I thought you guys were just drunk and it’d embarrass you or whatever.”

“Not gay,” Danny said, for the millionth time this week. “But thanks. I guess. I guess I shouldn’t have blackmailed you about the pot.”

“Damn right,” said Jake, and then he splashed the faucet at him, and they had a water-war til Dad yelled to stop drowning the kitchen.

* * *

"Hey," Danny said when it was his turn, and he gave a small wave. The redhead sitting across the circle from him — an engineering major, he remembered — waved back. "I'm Danny Francis, I'm from Schaumburg, and I'm another undecided."

Danny was supposed to be getting to know his classmates, he knew. This was his freshman seminar, which was _supposed_ to be a place for all of them to meet other students and ease into the process of being in college. It just also happened to be a place where there was a red-haired engineering major with freckles who was definitely looking back at him. He spent the next three students' introductions smiling at, and then writing a note to, her.

Then the fourth one said, "I'm a film major from Kentucky." 

Danny blinked. He leaned forward over his desk and looked to his left. Four desks down, the cute guy wearing glasses and a familiar smile said, "Oh, and I'm Eli! Eli Gronkowski," and an atom bomb exploded in Danny's brain.

As the group's attention moved on to the next classmate, Eli glanced over at Danny and then hesitantly smiled.

Danny grinned back, shocked and delighted, and used his pencil to tap out: _HI._

From the slow, warm bloom of Eli's smile, Danny knew he'd been understood.


	3. Chapter 3

Eli, Danny couldn’t help thinking, was a Pokemon.

He’d started out as the littlest version, the ones that eventually evolved into a third-level Pokemon that was bigger and more mature in every way while maintaining _just_ enough of the original’s look that it was recognizable as an evolution.

Eli was Charizard.

His shoulders were broader and his face was thinner, barely recognizable as the kid Danny had jumped in leaf piles with. He’d cut his wild hair and become _lanky_. No floppy Power Rangers sweater, either — somewhere along the line, he’d started wearing clothes that actually fit him.

Whenever Eli crossed Danny’s mind over the years, he’d known academically that he must have gotten older, but he’d always had a 14-year-old for a mental image. He was shellshocked for the rest of the class. Every once in a while, he glanced over and caught Eli smiling at somebody’s joke or intently taking notes as the professor talked, and the cognitive dissonance started all over again.

As class ended, Danny had a syllabus in hand but really wasn’t sure what else had gone down in the last half an hour. He started gathering his stuff so he could catch Eli before he left. He heard someone hum the banjo lick from _Deliverance_ amid the general hum of conversations and desks scraping the floor. Danny shoved his notebook and pens into his backpack, then looked up and saw that three of the guys who’d come in together, and had clearly gone to high school together, had paused on their way out the door and were talking to Eli. 

"You didn’t _sound_ like you're from Kentucky," one of them drawled in the stupidest fake accent Danny had ever heard. 'Kentucky' had at least eight syllables.

Danny felt his shoulders tighten instinctively at the look on Eli’s face. It was an older face, sure, but the same expression — tight and hunted. Danny took a step closer, but Eli surprised him.

"And you didn't sound like you're a douchebag, but clearly first impressions aren't always right," snapped Eli. The guy's two friends burst out laughing and their jerk buddy scoffed as they left the classroom.

“Assholes,” was the first (stupid) thing out of Danny’s mouth when he was standing in front of Eli. They were the same height, he registered distantly.

Eli glanced up from his phone warily, then broke into a smile when he saw Danny. “Yeah, well, what can you do?” he asked wryly.

“Look at you!” was the second stupid thing out of Danny’s mouth.

“Look at me? Look at _you_ ,” Eli retorted. He was grinning, and it was so unbelievably weird to see little-Eli’s smile on big-Eli’s face. “Have you bought _any_ new T-shirts since 2006?”

Danny reflexively looked down, checking out his Dave Matthews Band T-shirt, and then laughed. “Probably not,” he said. Once upon a time, they would have hugged, probably, but he wasn’t totally sure if that’d be appropriate with this stranger who he hadn’t exchanged so much as a one-line email with in at least three years. He settled for a broad smile. “Dude, it’s great to see you! What’re you doing here?”

“It’s funny — going to college, actually,” Eli said, slinging his backpack over his shoulder and gathering an armful of books. There wasn’t any sting in it, thanks to the smile and sidelong glance he was giving Danny.

Danny made a face, grinning. “You know what I mean. I thought you were loving it in the South.” They walked out of the classroom together. The hall outside was a jungle, every student for him or herself, and Danny didn't bother trying to fight it; he just let the flow of traffic carry him along toward the exit.

“I was,” Eli said, “but I follow the money, and admissions here gave me the best financial aid.”

“Cool.” They were both silent for a minute as they struggled through the front doors, then they pulled off to the side of the front steps of the building, squinting against the morning sun. “So—" Danny shoved his hands in his pockets. "How’s your family?”

“They’re good. Becky and my dad are both engaged, actually; how weird is that?”

“That’s great, not weird!”

“It’s both great _and_ completely weird," Eli said lightly. "What about you; did your brothers open their magic store?” He waggled his fingers dramatically on ‘magic store.’

He huffed a laugh. “Nah, that idea died pretty quick.”

“Color me shocked,” he said, dry.

“Mom and Dad are the same as always,” Danny said, and Eli smiled, because unlike the rest of Danny’s new friends here, Eli understood what that meant. “Jake’s in trade school for auto mechanic stuff, and Wilson is a junior executive with this printing company in Buffalo.”

“Well, shuffle me off to Buffalo!” Eli sing-songed with an awkward laugh. Danny didn't immediately recognize the reference but it made him grin — same old Eli. "Do you have another class now, or...?"

"Oh, no; I was actually gonna head back to the dorm." Danny thumbed in the general direction of the quad and the ring of dorms surrounding it.

"What a coincidence — me too,” said Eli, hop-skipping down the classroom building’s front steps. “Are you in McNamara?"

"Yeah!” Danny said, right at his heels. They fell in side-by-side on the path toward the dorms. “Have you noticed that the pipes—"

"Oh my God, it is like someone is being _murdered_ ," Eli said all at once, vehement.

"The first time I heard it, I seriously thought the hall was haunted."

"Don't tell me you still believe in ghosts," he said wryly.

“They’re among us,” Danny said, very seriously, and then he let himself grin. “Not in the s—”

Something started blasting “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” and Eli grabbed at his iPhone. "Sorry, can you give me a sec?"

"Yeah, definitely," said Danny, doing a quick couple of dance steps in place as the beat continued.

Eli grinned and held up the 'one minute' finger. "Hey you," he said into the phone. There was a definite easy, flirty tone to his voice. Danny tried not to listen too closely. He watched a game of ultimate frisbee that was being played across the quad.

"Listen, I just got out of class and I ran into somebody from Schaumburg; can I call you back in a while?" Eli continued. A girl made a diving catch to come up with the frisbee. "Uh huh, _oh_ -kay," Eli said, laughing. "Okay. Love you too. Bye." He lowered his phone from his ear and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans.

He looked at Danny. "Sorry, I promised my boyfriend I'd call this afternoon."

Boyfriend. Danny was kind of oblivious to that kind of thing as a general rule but he'd put two and two together eventually, even if it wasn’t until after Eli moved. In high school, Danny’d eventually clued in to the fact that most of their classmates had taken one look at Eli’s mannerisms and voice and assumed he was gay, but Danny had thought assumptions were shitty and Eli seemed genuinely panicked by talking to girls, and anyway, he’d always figured that Eli would tell him if he was.

Apparently not, Danny thought.

"Boyfriend, huh?" he said, and he clearly paused too long to get the comedic effect he was going for, because he could see Eli's face start to shift into wariness. "We've been here a week; that's some fast work," he added hurriedly, as he ran his ID card through the reader at the McNamara front door.

Eli snorted, his expression clearing, and he pulled the door open when the lock beeped. "If only I was that smooth of an operator. We went to high school together in Louisville." He looked like he was hesitating for a half a second, and then, as they waited for the elevator, he flicked the lock screen on his phone and held it up. "This is him."

Danny swapped his backpack to his other shoulder to avoid hitting Eli with it when he leaned in to look. Eli's iPhone background was a picture of two guys, one blurry but clearly in the middle of a laugh (and clearly Eli), and the other one grinning at the camera. Eli's boyfriend had close-cropped hair and a handsome face; he was wearing thick-rimmed glasses similar to Eli’s.

"Good-looking guy," Danny said, to Eli's smile.

"He's the best," Eli said, somehow dismissive and fond at the same time. "Totally worth the long-distance bullshit." The elevator doors rolled open and they stepped in together. Eli paused with his hand poised over the buttons. "What floor?"

"Seven."

Eli’s eyebrows rose. "We're neighbors again,” he said as he punched the button for the seventh floor. He leaned against the rail. “What number?"

"711."

"—What?” Eli demanded. “I'm in 714."

714 was CJ’s room, Danny realized after a half a stunned second; it was directly across the hall. "Holy shit, you’re CJ's disappearing roommate."

"This is crazy,” Eli said, staring at him. “Wait, _you're_ Dan/iel in 711?! I saw the sign on that door; nobody calls you Daniel! Or Dan!"

"The RA saw the system list my name as Daniel, and when I mentioned it, my roommate crossed out the I, the E, and the L, and decided he's gonna start a campaign to re-name me," Danny said, laughing. "What about you; where's _your_ sign? We all thought you were, like, nameless!"

"I took it down. Apparently the only person named Elijah who Kara could think of was the prophet." Eli rolled his eyes and Danny barked a laugh. "I haven't gotten around to making myself a new one yet — I'm thinking Elijah Wood."

"What _are_ you doing all the time?" Danny asked as the elevator doors opened. "CJ said he’s literally never met you."

"Oh, God," said Eli. "Do you really want the whole story? It's boring and there's no pay-off."

Danny made a _yes, obviously I want to hear it_ face while they took a left off the elevator. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

"So I did an open house for accepted students last spring and got friendly with a bunch of people; I applied for the floor that we all put down as our first choice, but I didn’t get it.” Eli pulled open the fire door and held it for Danny. “One of the guys pretty much doesn't have a roommate since his is always with his boyfriend, so I've been down there."

"You've already got friends and everything? You're all set."

"Oh, come on," Eli scoffed, "like you don't, Mr. Popular?"

"I just got here," Danny said, on the verge of a laugh.

"Like that matters; in no time at all, you're gonna know the entire student body, and half of them are going to want to date you and half of them are going to want to _be_ you," Eli foretold, and Danny laughed a little bit and rubbed the back of his neck.

"We have _really_ different memories of our childhoods," he said.

Eli looked bemused, and then a door opened down the hall and CJ staggered out, his eyes bleary and hair wild. “CJ,” Danny called, and CJ did two startled spins before coming to a halt facing them. “I found your roommate.” Eli tipped CJ a small salute in greeting.

“Oh, hey,” said CJ. “Listen, I gotta take a dump.” He ambled off toward the bathroom.

Eli shot Danny a wordless look that was somehow simultaneously offended and weirded out. Danny laughed. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “He’s like that with everybody; you’ll see when you get to know him.”

“Oh good,” said Eli, and he pumped his fist. “So much to look forward to!” Danny grinned, and then that was it — they were standing in the middle of the hall together. Someone down the hall was listening to something with a thumping bass line.

“Do you want to—” Danny started, just as Eli said, “I should probably—” They both laughed sheepishly in the awkward silence.

“I should call Jaden back, before he explodes,” Eli said lightly, tilting his iPhone back and forth in his hand.

“Explosions, definitely something to avoid,” said Danny, nodding amiably. “See you around?”

“Yeah, for sure.” Eli flashed a big, bright smile at him, then turned and let himself into his room, lifting his phone to his ear. Before he even shut the door, he was saying, “Hey, it’s me.”

Danny stood in the hall. He wasn’t disappointed, he told himself. There was nothing to be disappointed about. It was the first week of college, he was already making friends, and he’d reconnected with his old best friend. Life was good.

When he got back to his room after an information session on frat pledging late that night, he found a note on his and Joaquín’s whiteboard: a phone number, with a smiley face and what he’d be willing to bet was a Kentucky area code.

Danny grinned like hell and programmed it into his phone.

Life was good.

* * *

The whiteboards were why they became friends again.

Danny thought so, anyway; when he put that theory forward, Eli just laughed at him.

They had English Communication 101 together, both the lecture with two hundred other freshmen and the small seminar, but otherwise, their schedules didn’t mesh. Eli had picked completely different classes to fulfill gen ed requirements, and when he wasn’t in class or at meetings for band or clubs or whatever else he was doing, he was always with his friends on the fourth floor. Danny, meanwhile, was getting ready for club baseball tryouts, and between workouts and throwing the ball with his roommate, classes, looking into rushing a fraternity, hanging out with his hallmates and everybody else he was meeting, flirting with Ashley-from-English, and trying to get his homework done, he was stretched thin as it was.

He didn’t see much of Eli in the first month, but every few days, there was a new drawing on the whiteboard.

They started out simple — ghosts, dancing iPhones with legs, simplified cartoon people yelling at Danny to do his reading for English already — but quickly became elaborate as Danny retaliated with stick figures on scraps of notebook paper shoved under Eli and CJ’s door. Danny graduated to Post-Its after finding out that CJ had tried to roll a joint with one of his drawings. It wasn’t like it was any great loss, since the most complicated thing Danny could draw was a triangle, but his stick figures deserved better.

Eli didn’t take any of them down, so his door was almost completely wallpapered in yellow Post-It notes by the time that a brand new whiteboard finally appeared on the door one day.

Danny drew an exclamation mark and texted Eli on his way to class, phone in one hand, backpack in the other, and apple shoved between his teeth.

_u caved!_

The response came while he was sprinting across campus to his biology lecture; he didn’t see it til later that morning.

_i cave to nothing!! also what wtf u talking about_

Danny texted, _whiteboard_ , using his notebook as a shield as Professor Konega droned on and on. It actually felt kind of weird to be texting Eli. They mostly communicated via whiteboard, and even when they were kids, they’d preferred flashlights to cell phones.

Eli was apparently the kind of person who texted back immediately.

_oh, THAT_

_i couldn’t let me have all the fun, could i?_

_besides lbr it was getting hard to find the doorknob under all the post its_

Danny almost laughed out loud in the middle of class.

* * *

“Hey! Francis!” called a voice from behind, and Danny swung back toward the athletic center, his duffel bag of gear banging against his back. One of the guys who’d been watching the tryouts from the raised track above the gym floor — the guys who Danny had assumed were probably the current team — was jogging after him.

“Danny?” said his mom’s voice, and the guy from tryouts pulled up short with his hands raised apologetically as he realized Danny was on the phone. He was an unbelievably tall white guy, with big ears, a long face, and a buzzed head that probably needed some hair on it.

“Hang on a sec, Mom,” Danny said, lowering the phone.

“I just wanted to say good stuff out there, man,” said the guy, offering his hand, and Danny shook it. He had big hands and a hell of a grip. “I’m a starting pitcher so we’ll probably be working together a lot.”

“Does that mean I’m in?” Danny asked.

“Only Coach can tell you that, in a couple days,” said the pitcher, but he grinned at him. “See you around!”

“—ny?” Mom was saying, sounding weary, when Danny fit the phone back to his ear. “ _Daniel Francis_.”

“Hi,” he said, “sorry, one of the guys was talking to me.”

“How’d it go?” she asked.

Danny watched the tall pitcher jog away, catching up with a few of the other players. "Uh, pretty well, I think," he said, grinning.

"How was your timed running?" 

He made a face, starting the walk toward the dorms. He was a crafty base runner, sure, but not exactly a speedy one. "I did my best."

"So not great?" Mom said shrewdly, and he made a noncommittal sound. "Your best is all anybody can ask, Danno. What about the rest of it?"

"They seemed pretty happy with the throws down to first and my batting practice," he said, ducking around a couple of slow walkers on the path around the pond. "Coach is supposed to post the list on Tuesday, but one of the pitchers just introduced himself to me, so that's gotta be a good sign, right?"

"I think so," said Mom. "And you know we're proud of you no matter what."

"I know," said Danny, and he smiled at his feet.

The whiteboard drawing on Tuesday was the back of a jersey with 'FRANCIS' and '#29' written in big bubble letters, surrounded by congratulatory fireworks. Danny grinned at it for at least thirty seconds before he finally pulled out his phone and took a picture to text to his mom.

* * *

In October, Danny suddenly started seeing Eli all the time. And granted, he'd decided to save the frat decision til spring semester, so he had one less responsibility on his plate, but the sixth time in two days that he ran into Eli in the hall, he stopped and said, "Dude."

"Hey," Eli said, and he kept shuffling toward his room. He was wearing sweatpants in the middle of the afternoon, and not the kind of sweatpants that half the student body (Danny included) wore to class — the kind that screamed that somebody hadn't changed their clothes in like two or three days.

Danny reached out and caught his warm arm. Eli stopped immediately and swung to face him, blinking owlishly at him without his glasses. Danny let him go. "What's going on with you?"

"Shit got real on the fourth floor," Eli said mournfully.

He stared at him.

"Everybody was all excited about 'free love' at college but it got really incestuous really fast," Eli continued, "and now they're all pissed at each other, and I'm staying away for a while." He rolled his eyes. "Plus Mark got douchey when I turned him down."

Mark, if Danny remembered right, was the friend whose room Eli usually stayed in when he was on the fourth floor. He frowned. "Didn't he know about your boyfriend?"

"Yep," Eli said.

"Douche move," Danny commiserated.

"Yep," he said, popping the 'p' with more force this time. "Time to find a new best friend."

Danny leaned against the wall, folding his arms. "It's that bad?"

"I pretty much initiated nuclear winter on my way out," said Eli. "He was a _dick_." He kicked his heel lightly against the scuffed carpet. “I mean, I’m gonna hang out with everybody else again, after I take a break for a while; they all think Mark’s a dick, too.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Danny tried. “It gives you time to meet new people and try new things!”

“Oh my God, you’re a walking admissions brochure.”

“Seriously! I mean it! Come on, come hang out with me,” Danny said, and he hadn’t planned it, but now that it was out of his mouth, it sounded like the best idea ever.

“You’re not a new person or a new thing,” Eli said.

“I have _Star Trek_ on Blu-ray,” he said, tempting. “The original, all three seasons — remastered and everything.”

Eli’s chin rose sharply. “Remastered?” he demanded. “Do you know what they did to the special effects shots of the Enterprise?”

“Yeah, they took out the wires,” said Danny, and Eli glared at him for several long seconds before he said, “Let me go get my glasses.”

It was supposed to be a brief study break, but they watched four episodes in a row curled up in Danny’s bed with his laptop. When they weren’t arguing over the ways in which the theme song had been rewritten and the aspect ratios had been changed, they mostly watched in silence, leaving Danny to focus on the sound of Eli’s breathing beside him and the way the duvet rustled when he shuffled around in indignation. Their arms brushed a few times.

Danny was something of a connoisseur of romantic comedies (and getting teary-eyed over them, though he hid that fact from his brothers), and he hated the _She’s All That_ trope — the thing where the shy character took off her glasses and started wearing makeup (or, in this case, kept his glasses, grew seven inches in three years, and apparently started occasionally working out), and suddenly, every guy in the school wanted to get with her. What kind of movie was _that_ bullshit? 'Change everything about yourself and then you'll magically be hot'? Seriously?

Danny wasn’t pulling a _She’s All That_ , he thought. It wasn’t that Eli had been anything other than a cute, kind, interesting kid. It was just that Danny had been in the very beginnings of his so-maybe-I-could-like-guys-too hypothesis when Eli moved away, and more importantly, Eli had never said boo to him. He’d never put up any more than a token protest, at anything; he’d always agreed with Danny. This Eli, the one who was trying to argue that tribbles were the Ewoks of _Star Trek_ even though he knew that Danny had never seen _Return of the Jedi_ , was different. He was still kind of twitchy and probably always would be, but he was self-assured and confident in ways that 14-year-old Eli (and 14-year-old Danny, too) wouldn’t have dreamed of.

Danny was attracted to Eli. He could admit that to himself. Eli was attractive. Danny wouldn’t do anything about it — they were old friends, Eli had a serious boyfriend and was really uncomfortable after another friend of his had apparently put the moves on him (Danny could think of few things worse than making someone feel uncomfortable with him), and seriously, Danny just could not imagine dating Eli. They knew each other so young that the concept felt alien and bizarre.

“They’re the worst!” Eli insisted as tribbles kept falling out of overhead compartments on top of Captain Kirk, burying him in furballs. 

Danny looked at him, sidelong. “I still think they’re adorable,” he admitted, and Eli thunked the back of his head against the wall.

Danny’s roommate Joaquín shot them a look that Danny couldn’t quite read, when he came in halfway through their marathon, but he settled down at his desk with a book and a pair of headphones, and left them to their tribbles.

For a few weeks, Danny and Eli hung out all the time. Eli was clearly lonely without his friends, so Danny was happy to introduce him to _his_ friends and invite him to sit at dinner with them. They drove to the diner at two A.M., sometimes with other people and sometimes just the two of them, blasting Ke$ha and singing every word, and they used classic _Trek_ episodes to bribe each other through writing papers and studying.

Before the end of finals, Eli made up with his friends (all of them but Mark) and went back to having his own life, but by then, Danny was used to two quick knocks and then the door opening, Eli carrying his laptop with a YouTube video that Danny apparently needed to see immediately (Eli was always right), and he was used to Eli texting him terrible puns and sitting beside him in English.

Apparently, Danny was talking about Eli a lot, because when he went home for Christmas, Jake only waited about six hours before he said, “So is Eli Gronks still in loooove with you or what?”

Danny almost spit peas across the dinner table.

“... Dude,” said Jake, with a disbelieving stare that fairly screamed: _come on._

“Yeah, for real, that kid worshipped the ground you walked on,” said Wilson easily, like they _weren’t_ blowing Danny’s mind right now, and then he went back to the conversation he’d been having with his girlfriend, who seemed nice, if kind of overwhelmed by their family.

“It was gross,” Jake said. “Not the Eli part or the gay part, just the you part.”

“Shut up,” said Danny automatically, starting to recover.

“Let’s be real, for a few years, I thought I was going to have a son-in-law,” said Dad, and Danny said, “Oh my God” while his brothers laughed at him and Mom snorted.

He’d genuinely had no idea that Eli might have had a crush on him when they were kids, but now that he thought about it, it seemed painfully obvious.

“How _is_ Eli? Really?” asked Mom after dinner, while the two of them were having their annual sit-down in the living room with all the lights out except for the tree and the fireplace. The tree this year was lopsided and funny-looking as usual, covered in every single hideous ornament that Danny and his brothers had made since kindergarten and Dad had refused to throw away. Its lights cast the room in a warm, cozy glow.

“He’s good,” Danny said, and then his phone chimed. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at it. “He’s … actually texting me.” _merry christmas, ya filthy animal_ , said the text, and Danny recognized the line and was already grinning even before the second text came in with: _and a happy new year._

He texted back, _too full to come up w more home alone references, lol. merry christmas!_

When he glanced across the half-dark room, Mom was shooting him a knowing look.

“It’s not like that,” Danny told her. “He has a boyfriend, and there was this girl in my composition class.”

“Okay,” said Mom placidly, and she hit the remote to start Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” all over again.

Mom might have let it go, but Danny found himself thinking about the Eli thing a lot over the next couple weeks. 

Wilson had said that Eli worshipped the ground that Danny walked on when they were kids, and in retrospect... Eli had always gone to all of his games, known exactly what was going on in his life, given handmade birthday cards, and hidden his fear of worm intestines from the rest of their classmates.

Danny only remembered attending one or two of Eli’s childhood band concerts. He definitely hadn’t been to any of the university marching band performances this year, and he knew that Eli was in some clubs but he couldn’t actually remember which ones. Eli was always looking over his essays for him, sending him YouTube links to the perfect video for any given moment, driving them around in his beater car — was Danny taking Eli for granted, and was it something he'd done before?

When he got back to campus in January, the first thing Danny did was open Paint and Google image search. The second thing was plug in his printer.

A while later, there were two quick raps at the door and then it opened. Danny, sitting at his desk with his feet up and laptop in his lap, looked over and then grinned at Eli’s head sticking in the door. He was still wearing his coat, scarf, and hat; from the state of them, it was snowing.

“Did you do this?” Eli demanded, shoving the door all the way open and then pointing across the hall. There was a new sign on his door, next to CJ’s name: a print-out of Eli Manning hurling a touchdown pass, with “ELI” typed over it in big blocky letters. It was a reasonable facsimile of the name tags on everyone else's door, if Danny did say so himself.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Danny said. “Welcome back to Illinois.”

Eli stared at him for a long, inscrutable minute, and then he said, “You couldn’t have at least picked Elijah Wood?”

* * *

The first day of January term, Danny walked in the door and saw Ashley, the redheaded engineering major who'd been in his English comp class first semester. He grinned, took a second to compose himself, and then took the open seat beside her.

“And how was _your_ commercialized holiday?” Ashley asked. “Did you get everything you asked for?”

“Well,” Danny said, as he pulled _The Handmaid’s Tale_ and a notebook out of his backpack, “I got socks.”

Ashley laughed merrily. “Did you ask for socks?”

“No, but I needed them,” Danny said, and Ashley laughed again and turned to fully face him, her chin in her hand and her elbow on her desk.

Just then, Eli came in with the next wave of stragglers. He frowned when he saw Danny sitting in the front row, then he clearly spotted Ashley and his eyebrows rose. He made like he was going to walk right past them. Danny reached out and grabbed his backpack to bring him to a screeching halt, then tugged him toward the empty desk on his other side as Eli backpedaled furiously to keep up. Eli sat down in a huff.

“So I heard through the grapevine that we’re going to get assigned a group project,” Danny said, like nothing had just happened.

“Through the grapevine, huh?” asked Ashley. She had a sly, amused smile.

Eli leaned around Danny. “He ran into the TA at Starbucks and bribed him with a mochachino to spill the professor's lesson plan.”

“I offered to buy his coffee because he forgot his wallet, and it came up in the conversation,” Danny corrected cheerfully. “ _Anyway_ , it’s gonna be groups of three, so what do you guys think?”

“—Oh!” said Ashley. Danny heard Eli drop his pencil behind him. Danny grinned hopefully at Ashley and she smiled back, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Yeah, Danny, that sounds great.”

Danny turned around and made a _please, please_ face at Eli when he knew Ashley couldn’t see it. “Yeah!” echoed Eli, “great,” and he shot them an overly-enthusiastic thumbs up.

"So we should probably exchange numbers, right?" Danny said, and he knew, from Ashley's immediate grin as she pulled out her phone, that he was being wildly transparent and she didn't mind one bit.

“Ashley’s really smart,” Danny said after class when he and Eli were walking back to the dorms together. The wind was whistling down off the lake a couple blocks over, cutting into Danny’s exposed skin. He hunched his shoulders against it and resolved to buy a hat already.

Eli shot him a funny look. At least, Danny thought he did — Eli had his scarf wrapped around his head so many times that it was hard to see his face. “I never said she wasn’t,” he said, muffled. “I like Ashley.”

“Okay,” said Danny, and they walked in silence for about ten seconds before Eli caved.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to wingman, but you _did_ just saddle yourselves with a third wheel for the rest of the month,” Eli pointed out.

“You’re the best third wheel I know,” Danny said cheerfully, laughing at Eli’s groan.

For all their joking, Eli was definitely the third wheel. Ashley was brilliant and slyly funny and gorgeous, and Danny tried not to, because he knew they had to get the work done and it left Eli sitting there checking his texts and pretending to have selective hearing, but the two of them spent most of their group meetings in the library getting derailed by how interested they were in each other.

The first time they met in Danny’s room because all the group study rooms at the library were taken, Joaquín spent the entire hour shooting them increasingly bewildered looks until even Danny noticed. When Eli left for his nightly Skype call with his boyfriend and Danny got back from walking Ashley to her dorm, Joaquín said, “Okay, what the hell?” the second Danny opened their door.

“What?” Danny asked, instinctively looking down at himself to see if there was something on his shirt. There wasn’t; he hung his jacket on the back of the door.

“What was that, Dan?” Joaquín said, shutting his laptop and leaving it balanced on his stomach. “I thought you and Dweeby—”

Danny gave up on trying to make his roommate call him Danny way back during the first week of orientation (he didn't try very hard, granted; it didn't really bother him), but he frowned and corrected, “Eli,” like he did every time, even if he thought Eli actually found the nickname kind of funny.

“—had a thing, but you were getting your flirt on right in front of him.”

It took Danny half a second to parse that. “What?” He stopped unwinding his scarf long enough to stare over at his roommate. “He has a boyfriend in Kentucky.”

“He has a boyfriend in _Kentucky_.” Joaquín wiggled his eyebrows.

“No,” he said firmly.

“Man, you just blew my mind. I suddenly do not understand that friendship, at all,” said Joaquín, and Danny rolled his eyes, told him to shut up, and rifled a book at him for good measure.


	4. Chapter 4

Danny was swearing at the calculus homework he’d been working on since midnight, while Joaquín and Shortstop Sean played _Call of Duty_ and made fun of him, when his phone rang. Danny gratefully lunged for it. “This is — really important, I’ve definitely gotta take this,” he said, to derisive laughter from the peanut gallery, and he picked up without looking at the screen. “Hello?”

“Danny?” said Eli, though it took Danny a minute to recognize the voice under the sheer amount of _noise_ surrounding it. Eli was either watching six movies at once at full volume or he was in the middle of a hell of a party. Neither sounded like a scenario that Danny would have expected, given that it was the first night of Boyfriend Visit and that was all Eli had been talking about for weeks.

“Hey,” Danny said, immediately swiveling away from Sean and Joaquín. “What’s up?”

“If I text you an address, can you come pick me up?” 

“—Yeah,” said Danny, surprised. “Definitely.”

“Thanks.” The noise stopped.

“... Hello?” Danny asked, but he was gone. He stared at his phone, and a text came in with an address in Blue Island. Danny looked up. “Sean?”

“Yo,” said Sean, leaning forward over his controller.

“Can I use your car?”

“Whatever, yeah,” he said absently, machine-gunning something on the TV while Joaquín swore, and he somehow managed to dig his car keys out of his pocket and toss them to Danny without pausing the game or looking away from the screen. “Lot five, third row.”

“Thanks,” said Danny, and he grabbed his ID card, keys, and coat, and scrambled out the door. 

He called Eli back while he was sitting at a stop light on the south side, waiting for the heat blasting out of the vents to finally get warm. The call went straight to voicemail, and Danny said, “Hey, I’m on my way; give me a call when you get this” before tossing his phone into the passenger seat and gunning it.

Sean’s car was a junker that Sean liked to brag wouldn’t pass another year’s inspection; it rattled, the heat half-heartedly wheezed lukewarm air, and Danny could feel every bump in the road vibrate through his feet. One speaker in the backseat worked, though, so Danny clicked the radio on and uneasily listened to weak, crackly pop music on the 20-minute drive south.

It was almost two A.M. by the time that Danny rolled up in front of a big house on a residential street in Blue Island. The lights were blazing and people wearing parkas were spilling out into the yard to smoke, red Solo cups in hand. There was barely enough room to drive down the one-way street, inching between two endless rows of parked cars. Danny pulled into a neighboring driveway and called Eli again.

This time, he picked up. “Are you here?”

“Yeah, green Jeep sitting like a creeper in the neighbors’ driveway,” Danny said, squinting out into the darkness as he killed the engine.

“Front steps,” said Eli, and he hung up again.

Danny didn’t bother locking the car; he just left it in the driveway, keys in his pocket, as he walked across the street to #1212. There was loud music thumping from inside the house. When he got closer, someone sitting on the front steps stood up, and then so did someone else who’d been crouching just behind on the porch. It was Eli, all right, and Jaden, who Danny had briefly met when he arrived from Kentucky that afternoon. They'd only spoken for a minute, Eli beaming from ear to ear and pulling his boyfriend by the hand to give him a tour of campus, but Jaden had seemed just as great as Eli had spent months saying he was.

“And now we leave,” Eli said now, his hands jammed in his coat pockets and his chin low, and he brushed right past Danny and went straight for the Jeep.

“Whoa,” said Danny, and Jaden called, “Eli!” as he came down the stairs after him, but Eli weaved across the street without slowing down.

Danny turned and looked at Jaden, who’d stopped at the foot of the stairs and was staring after Eli. A car door slammed behind Danny. Jaden’s face settled. He folded his arms over his sweater, glancing down at his feet, then looked at Danny.

Danny got the general idea. He said, “Fuck,” and turned and went back to the car. 

When he opened the driver’s side door, Eli said, “Can we please leave.”

“Yeah, no problem,” said Danny, buckling his seat belt and checking Eli’s, and then he turned on the car and backed out of the driveway. He glanced in the rearview mirror as he took a left off the end off the street. The last thing he saw was Jaden still standing in the front yard.

Danny glanced into the passenger seat under the intermittent flashes of light provided by passing streetlights. Eli was huddled against the door, looking out the window. “He didn’t need a ride, right?” Danny said, finally, and Eli laughed wetly.

“No,” he said, sounding drunk and congested. “His sister’s friend invited us to the party, and he’s gonna stay with her for the rest of his trip.”

Danny drove a few more blocks, following the signs to Route 57 through sleepy silent residential streets and shuttered businesses. “What happened?” he asked.

“We got drunk and he broke up with me before he meant to,” Eli said against the window.

“Shit, Eli,” he said, genuine and helpless. “I’m really sorry.”

Eli sniffed and Danny saw him nod in acknowledgement out of the corner of his eye, and they were quiet for a while.

When they were bombing along on the highway, Eli took an audible deep, rattling breath. “Thanks for maybe stealing a really shitty car, I don’t know; if you stole this, I have serious doubts about your taste,” said Eli, and Danny smiled a little bit as he glanced over at him again. “Can we turn on the radio?”

“It kind of sucks,” Danny warned as he switched it on, but the wet sniffling coming from the passenger seat eased up the farther they traveled, and maybe it was thanks to Taio Cruz and Katy Perry; who knew?

Danny drove to the all-night diner and poured Eli into a booth. The waitress took one look at them and brought them a whole pot of coffee, and Danny topped off Eli’s mug until he was pretty sure he was bleary-eyed from just sadness, and not sadness and the tequila that he reeked of. 

“God,” said Eli, his forehead pressed against the table, “ _distance_ ,” and Danny reassessed and poured him another cup of black coffee, then nudged his plate of pancakes closer. Eli didn’t lift his head. “Thanks for coming to get me in the middle of the night,” he said quietly.

Danny thought of worm dissections and sparkly signs. “Anytime,” he promised, and meant it.

* * *

Danny and Ashley mostly finished the Jan-term project on their own. It wasn’t much of a project — read a book, make a Powerpoint, give a presentation — but Eli wasn’t capable of much at all. He made a valiant effort but he spent most of their planning sessions sitting quietly at the table, doodling, while Danny and Ashley brainstormed and tried in vain to include him. His main contribution was making WordArt titles for their Powerpoint. It was a good thing that Jan term meant only one class, Danny thought; he wasn't sure Eli could have made it through a regular semester schedule.

When Danny knocked on the door to grab Eli for one of their final meetings, CJ answered and hissed “Shhhh!” at him with a finger over his mouth. Danny peered around the door and saw Eli asleep on his bed with his arm dangling off the edge. Danny pulled an old Post-It down off the door, one that said (for some reason) “SHUT UP!!!!”, and he wrote ‘ _library, call me_ ’ on the back and then left it on top of Eli’s cell phone on his desk.

In the library, Ashley was nothing but sympathetic. “God, that’s so awful,” she said, her hand resting on Danny’s arm on the table. “How long had they been dating?”

“I think like two years,” Danny said. “I know we’re all supposed to be doing equal work here, but I didn’t want to—”

Ashley was shaking her head firmly. “No way; let the poor guy sleep,” she said. “We’ll break the presentation into three parts and go over Eli’s with him later.”

“You’re awesome,” Danny told her, brimming over with warmth, and Ashley laughed and tossed her hair.

“I try,” she told him, smiling, and they got down to a serious discussion of the overarching themes in _Brave New World_ and how they could be tied to current events.

They left the library at closing. It was beginning to snow softly, and Ashley stopped under a streetlight and raised her face and shut her eyes, smiling. The snow fell into her hair in a corona, lit by the warm yellow glow of the light. 

Danny had watched enough romantic comedies to recognize magic when he saw it. He stepped in. Ashley opened her eyes and blinked up at him, then her smile turned softer and she leaned toward him. He kissed her gently in the snow, and she laughed against his mouth and pulled him close with cold hands against the back of his neck.

Eli called later, after Danny had walked Ashley home and then gotten caught up in a huge snowball war along the quad on his way back to McNamara. About five seconds after Danny’s phone loudly started ringing, there were two raps on the door and Eli walked in. The TV was on, _You’ve Got Mail_ playing on one of the movie channels, and Danny was struggling his way out of icy clothing.

Eli hung up the call he’d placed, then tugged Danny’s scarf out of the tangle it’d gotten into with his backpack. “Thanks,” said Danny, finally able to drop his backpack. He stripped off his hat, scarf, and coat, and dumped them in a wet heap.

Eli went over and plunked down on the foot of his bed, sitting against the wall. “How’d the meeting go?” he asked.

“Uh, good!” said Danny through his sweater, and then he peeled it the rest of the way over his head. “We’ve got a basic structure down for the presentation and we added your titles to the Powerpoint; now we just have to finish the script.”

“You should have woken me up. I don’t want you guys to do all the work for me,” he said.

”Sorry,” said Danny, not really sorry at all. “Next time. Me and Ashley don’t have a problem with doing stuff, though; she was totally cool with it.”

Eli still didn’t look thrilled but he pushed over to give Danny more room when Danny sat down beside him. Danny glanced at the lovey-dovey movie playing on the TV, then glanced uneasily at Eli. “I can change it,” he said, reaching for the remote.

“What? No, I’ve never seen this,” Eli said. “It’s great; look at this internet stuff. A sound effect actually said ‘you’ve got mail’ when you had a new email? It’s like watching dinosaurs roam the earth.”

“How have you never seen this?” Danny asked incredulously, and then he said the next line out loud along with Tom Hanks’s little half-brother: “ ‘F-O-X.’ ”

Eli glanced at him, looking amused, then looked back at the TV again. They watched the rest of the Fox family’s trip to Meg Ryan’s bookstore in silence, Danny feeling his fingers and ears slowly start to thaw.

Eli suddenly asked, “Are you and Ashley dating?” Danny froze but he could tell, out of the corner of his eye, that Eli kept steadily looking at him.

“Yeah,” Danny admitted. “I mean — we made a date; we’re not dating dating, not officially or anything.”

“Good,” said Eli. “I’m happy for you guys.”

When Meg Ryan’s bookstore, the one where she’d had all her best childhood memories with her now-dead mother, was forced to close, Danny realized that Eli probably wasn’t the one who he’d had to worry about here. His eyes prickled and he blinked rapidly.

Eli noticed, right around when Meg Ryan’s weird friend started trying to convince her that closing the bookstore didn’t mean losing her dead mom’s memories. “Oh no,” he said. “That still happens when you watch this stuff?”

Danny swallowed hard and shrugged helplessly, not trusting his voice. 

“Um, umm,” said Eli, “why did the chicken cross the road?”

He cleared his throat. “What are you doing?” he asked, steadfastly not looking away from the TV. He heard the shake in his voice.

“Who cares; it’s a fucking chicken,” said Eli, and Danny turned and stared at him. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” This time, Eli didn’t wait for a response. “To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.”

That one startled a snort out of Danny. Eli lit up, triumphant, and said, “Knock knock!”

“Who’s there?” said Danny obediently.

“Nana.”

“Nana who?”

“Nana yo business!” Eli finished, looking so pleased with himself that Danny burst out laughing.

“These are the worst jokes I’ve ever heard.”

Eli pointed out, “Not crying now, are you?”

Danny surreptitiously Googled ‘best knock knock jokes’ on his phone while they watched the end of the movie, and for the rest of the month, whenever Eli started to go glassy-eyed in situations where Danny knew he wouldn't want to cry, Danny hit him with a rapid-fire barrage of terrible jokes.

They had the bonus effect of usually making Ashley laugh, too, even as she wrinkled her nose at them.

Danny liked to credit the trio's A+ in J-term English to the note full of joke ideas that he kept on his iPhone.

* * *

Ashley was amazing.

She was cool and scathingly funny, from a small town in Connecticut where, she said, the only things to do past seven o’clock at night were (a) study, or (b) run around in Walmart til security kicked you out. Ashley had chosen door #1, as far as Danny could tell, and that was how she’d wound up in the biomedical engineering program on a full-ride scholarship. She was the most confident person he’d ever met.

She fought for the check at the end of dates, but she liked it when he held doors and offered her his hoodie. Fitting in dates was hard sometimes, especially once spring semester started. With a full class load and ramped-up baseball practices in preparation for the upcoming season, Danny was all over the place, and Ashley’s intense class schedule wasn’t much better. Making time was worth it, though, even if it meant that he had to lose some time elsewhere. His friends understood, Danny reasoned.

They went to see movies that Danny probably wouldn’t have picked on his own. Some were fantastic and he’d watch, riveted, with Ashley just as transfixed under his arm. Some were busts, where he’d get bored and start tapping his foot a half an hour in, and then Ashley would get frustrated when he inevitably fidgeted over and over again no matter how many times she put her hand on his knee, and then she’d make out with him for the rest of the movie because it was a fun, guaranteed way to make him stop twitching.

Danny couldn’t say that he really minded the busts.

Ashley’s sly sense of humor, her practicality and the way she could just flick her eyes toward him and give him the shudders, carried over into all aspects of their relationship. They only eventually came up for air one afternoon because Joaquín’s texts about needing to leave the library and get at his stuff started becoming increasingly frequent and annoyed. Danny offered to walk Ashley home, but she just leaned down and planted a long, slow kiss on his mouth, and promised, “I’ll get home just fine on my own, cowboy; you’ve got classes to pass.” She patted him on the ass and then let herself out.

Danny dragged himself out of bed long enough to put pants on, crack a window, and text Joaquín that it was safe to return. Then he went facefirst into bed again, and he was still there when the door opened and footsteps came inside.

“Whoo boy,” said Joaquín, and his keys jangled as he dropped them. “Are you even alive in here?”

“I’m dead,” Danny said blissfully into his pillow.

“I’d high-five you but I do _not_ wanna touch you or anything else in this room right now,” said Joaquín. “Air-five, Dan.” 

Without lifting his face, Danny held up his hand and gave a slow, exaggerated half of a high-five.

* * *

By the time opening day rolled around in early March, Danny could say the name "Jaden" in front of Eli without Eli's expression crumpling, and Danny was still trying not to rub it in the-recently-dumped's face but he had a Facebook-official girlfriend; one who insisted on coming to his first game, even though it was away.

“I’ve never dated a sports star before,” Ashley said, grinning, and that was the end of it. She wound up piling into Eli’s car with two of her friends, and the four of them drove to DeKalb together. That was the plan they'd made through Danny, anyway, and it looked like it had gone through without a hitch when Danny glanced up into the stands before the game and saw them all sitting together.

He jogged over to the third base line when he had a free minute, weighed down by half his catcher’s gear, and Ashley and Eli climbed down to meet him. At first glance, Danny couldn’t tell whose comically-large sunglasses were bigger.

”Hey guys, thanks for coming,” he said, grinning at them.

“Look at you, eye-black and everything,” Ashley said, miming beneath her own eyes with two fingers, “very official.” She leaned across the fence and pecked him on the mouth. Amid the snap of baseballs hitting gloves behind him, there were some wolf-whistles. Danny ignored them.

“Is that what that is?” Eli asked. “I thought it was eyeliner.” Ashley shot him a funny look before laughing, but Danny knew he was just clowning. Probably.

“We’ve been friends for years and you still don’t understand the rules. I don’t get it,” Danny said. “You came to, like, _every game_ when we were kids.”

“I didn’t go for the baseball, Danny.” Danny raised his eyebrows high, and Eli finished, serious: “I went for the butts.”

Ashley threw her head back and laughed, clapping, and Danny laughed, too. Over the noise, Eli said, “Praise baseball uniforms.”

“Hallelujah,” said Ashley, still cackling.

“Okay,” allowed Danny, “I get that. It can be a pretty solid view, depending on the player; they are some _really_ tight pants.” 

“You’re damn right,” Ashley said. She reached over the fence and smacked Danny’s ass. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Eli held up a sheet of paper and rattled it encouragingly. He’d written _GO DANNY_ on it, in a streamlined version of the spangly works of art that he used to turn up at games with when they were kids. Danny saw Ashley double-take at it.

”Right on, right on!” Danny cheered with a fist-pump, and then he lowered his facemask and jogged back to finish warming up with the starting pitcher.

In the end, it wasn’t much of a game. The Hornets lost to Northern Illinois U by four runs. But God, the feeling of being out there again, blocking the plate like a tank or high-fiving teammates when they returned to the dugout after successful at-bats — Danny wouldn't have traded that for anything.

When the bus dropped them back on-campus that night, Ashley was waiting in the parking lot, all wrapped up in a giant puffy coat and perched on the hood of a stranger’s car with her sunglasses in her hair. She hopped down and jogged to greet him.

“You didn’t wait long, did you?” he asked, hauling the catchers’ bag.

“Just a few minutes,” she said, and she eyed the bag. “And I can wait a few more.” He grinned apologetically at her and ducked inside the athletic center, following the rest of the team.

After he’d stowed the gear, Danny stopped by the locker room to grab his stuff. “Yo Francis, that your girlfriend?” asked Adam, still absurdly tall, even for a pitcher.

Danny glanced over. “Yeah,” he said, pulling his coat on over his uniform and shoving his cleats in his duffel bag. Ashley was waiting; he'd shower at home.

“Seriously?” asked one of the other guys.

Danny blinked. “Uh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. That was Ashley, my girlfriend.”

“He’s not dating the squirrely dude,” said Joaquin in passing, towel already draped around his neck, and at least three teammates said, “ _Ohhhh_.”

Danny figured that saying ‘he’s not squirrely’ probably wouldn’t help matters any. He took a wary glance around but none of them sounded like a _bad_ ‘ohhhh’ and nobody was looking at him funny, so he shrugged and said, “See you guys at practice,” and amid casual goodbyes, went in search of Ashley. 

He found her sitting on the building steps outside. “I think I just came out to half the team in the locker room,” Danny said, pulling her to her feet. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s cute how you think they didn’t know,” Ashley said. “Baby, it’s on your Facebook and they’re a bunch of gossipy teenage girls. They knew.” She patted his arm. “Home?”

“My place or yours?” he asked.

“Yours,” she said, tucking her hands into the crook of his elbow for the walk back to the dorms.

It was only later that Danny thought to ask, “Hey, how’d everything go with Eli and the girls?”

“Oh, fine,” Ashley said, sitting on his bed while he towel-dried his hair from the shower. “Everybody got along really well. We shared all your deepest, darkest secrets.”

He laughed. “Yeah, okay.” He tossed the towel on top of his dresser.

“I mean, the music in the car was bad and it was a _little_ embarrassing, with the sign and everything,” she held her hands up about a foot apart and pantomimed waving an invisible sign, “but everything was g—”

All at once, the lump in Joaquín’s bed shifted angrily. “Excuse me,” Joaquín said, popping up above his comforter, “but some of us spent the entire day being athletic and shit and have a seven A.M. study session tomorrow, so if we could _please_ keep the heart to hearts to a minimum, that’d be great.”

”Sorry,” said Danny, making eyes at Ashley as soon as Joaquín disappeared under the covers again, and Ashley stifled a laugh with the back of her hand and chorused, “Sorry Joaquín!” They grabbed their coats and tip-toed out together, each shushing the other one as they both laughed.

“Hey, Ash said you guys had fun,” Danny said when he ran into Eli in the bathroom, later.

“Yayyy,” deadpanned Eli through a mouthful of toothpaste, waving his arms above his head, and he spit in the sink and walked out into the hall. Danny blinked after him, but Joaquín yelled, “Danny, make your fucking phone stop ringing!” so loudly that Danny heard him through two closed doors, and the roommate bellowing like a wounded ox kind of took priority.

* * *

Over spring break, a short roster for both the baseball and the softball teams traveled to Florida to play in sunshine state tournaments. Danny and most of the freshmen were left behind, but he was good with that, especially when it meant that both his roommate and Ashley's (who played third base on the softball team) were gone for a solid week. 

The campus emptied out pretty thoroughly — the dining hall was a ghost town, no lines and always enough cake, and the dorms were eerily silent at night.

"If we're ever gonna get haunted by the spirit of some freshman who got lost in the basement trying to find the laundry room, it'll be this week," said Eli. Danny had only remembered that Eli had decided not to drive home to Kentucky when he stumbled out of bed that afternoon and found a fresh drawing on his whiteboard.

"Halloween was more likely," Danny said distractedly, lying sprawled across Eli's bed with his phone. "Maybe the solstice." Ashley was texting him her plans for the evening. God, were they sexy plans.

"Nerd," said Eli peacefully. He was watching some kind of car crash compilation video, screeching brakes and tinny Russian shouting echoing out of his laptop speakers. Even with his roommate gone home and the window open on the sharp spring air, his room reeked of socks and weed. Someone shrieked in the video and Eli made that noise where he laughed and groaned at the same time. "Oh my God, that was amazing." He leaned over from his desk and swatted at Danny's foot. "You've got to see this."

"One sec." He scrolled back up to read the entirety of his conversation with Ashley. It had started out innocently enough, teasing her with dinner ideas while she was hungry and stuck in a study session with some friends, but had devolved unsurprisingly quickly. He stifled a snort at her latest message — stolen Cool Whip from the dining commons probably wasn't going to make the effect she was talking about.

"Danny," said Eli.

"Mmm." He typed: _forget raiding the commons, lets go somewhere with real food_

 _now you're talking!!_ Ashley texted back. _and then there won't be much talking, after ;) ;)_

Danny laughed, then realized abruptly that all other noise in the room had stopped. He looked up and found Eli turned toward him, the YouTube video paused and an expectant look on his face.

"Sorry, Ash is stuck in a study group," Danny said, wiggling his phone.

"Over spring vacation? That girl works too hard."

"Biomed engineering," Danny said, like it explained everything, which — it kind of did. The department was notorious. Eli nodded, looking sympathetic. "Tonight's the only night this week that she isn't working on her stats project."

"Oh?" 

"Yeah, I'm stealing her," he said. "We're gonna go wild and eat somewhere off-campus."

"Oh," said Eli, with more finality this time. "Okay. So — _Final Destination_ marathon...?"

Danny suddenly remembered. He looked up from his phone. " _Shit_ ," he said. 

They'd talked last weekend about watching the first four movies (which Eli owned, because he had amazing taste) and then trying to predict the means of death that would happen in the upcoming fifth, but between the student film that Eli was helping a friend edit and Danny's practice schedule, they hadn't been able to find a day when they were both free until Wednesday. 

Which was apparently today.

It turned out that Danny was really bad at keeping track of the days of the week without a class schedule to guide him.

"Shit, Eli, I'm sorry; I totally forgot."

"Yeah." Eli pulled a smile that looked wry, to Danny's eye. "I kind of figured."

"My bad. You don't mind, right?" he asked. He heard his phone chime with another incoming text. "I mean — I'm here all week, and you're here all week, and this is the only night Ashley has free, so we can do it, like, tomorrow instead."

"No," said Eli. "I mean yeah, of course. Next time."

There was no next time, in the end. They were both too busy despite the best of intentions, Danny thought, and then it was midterms. "College," Danny said cheerfully when Eli mentioned it, "what can you do?"

"Yeah," Eli said. "College."

In the last week of March, Joaquín somehow managed to lock himself out of their room at one in the morning, wearing only a towel, while the RA on-duty was nowhere to be found. Danny knew something was up after ignoring two calls in a row that he figured were drunk-dials, but he only found out about it for real the next morning when he rolled over in Ashley's bed while she was in the shower and turned on his phone. He had six missed calls and eight text messages, all equally irritated at him for not being home or answering. The last one said _GREAT NOW IT'S ON FB._

_Wait you're shirtless on FB and you're PISSED about it??_ he texted back, and then he pulled up Facebook. Joaquín had been tagged in a photo by one of the girls on the hall; he was striking a cheesy pose for the camera, dripping wet and wearing only a hot pink towel low on his hips. The caption said _@Joaquín Soto Vargas, givin us a free show!!_ and there was already a comment war happening. Danny laughed and clicked 'like,' and Joaquín gave him the silent treatment for three whole hours before finally admitting that fine, he knew he looked good so he actually appreciated the Facebook pictures, but in the future, would Danny please answer his fucking phone if he called multiple times in a row?

The next week, Danny was so tired after a hard practice that he slept right through dinner plans.

The week after that, he and Ashley went to see _The King's Speech_ instead of doing midnight breakfast with the rest of Danny's hall.

Danny genuinely didn't think about it as a pattern until the morning when Eli knocked twice, marched into his room, and said, “Danny, this blows.”

Danny pulled his shirt the rest of the way over his head and tugged it down over his stomach. “Hey!” he said. “What blows?” Then he got a good look at Eli’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve blown me off _four times_ in two weeks,” Eli said, his expression set, “so before I start yelling at you, I want to make sure that I'm not being a dick — are you swamped?”

“Um,” said Danny, understanding what Eli was probably getting at, “no, not really.” It was a lot, sometimes, especially when he was this busy, but he couldn’t truthfully say that he felt like his ADD was currently overwhelming or affecting his time management any more than usual.

“I know that in the past, I would have just taken this crap — and probably been really really passive-aggressive about it, sorry — but I want to be straightforward with you.” Eli sounded deeply rehearsed. He was holding perfectly still aside from his face. “I know you’ve got a lot of stuff on your plate and you don’t have a ton of time, and I’m good with that, but when when you say you’re going to be somewhere, I just need you to follow through,” he said, still standing just inside the door. “My time is important, too.”

“Of course it is.” Danny felt weirdly wobbly at the knees. "It's really important."

“That’s it; I’ll see you later,” he said stiffly, and then — without even noticing, Danny thought, that Joaquín had lifted his duvet off his head and blearily sat up in bed — he fled back across the hall.

Danny’s immediate instinct was to go after him, to get some more clarification and then most likely profusely apologize, but he knew how Eli felt about confrontation and he knew he’d probably want some time to himself to recover. 

“Dweeby’s actually right,” Joaquín said, into the silence. “I know you’re stoked about the girlfriend and everything, but you’ve gotta balance, man. I covered when you were late for practice the other day but, heads up, Coach is gonna murder you and wear your skin next time.”

“Shit,” said Danny into his hands, against the rising tide of moments that he hadn’t thought to put together until now and the overwhelming wall of guilt starting to throb in his chest. “I know, about the skin thing. Sorry. Thanks.”

“Whatever, as long as you know.” He rolled over and immediately went back to sleep, like he somehow always managed to do.

Danny stared at himself in the mirror over the dresser, stricken.

* * *

Ashley didn't take the whole 'I've been so wrapped up in you that I was slacking on my friendships and team activities so we probably need to be less attached at the hip and stuff' conversation very well. To be fair, Danny didn't bring it up well, either. In fact, he was pretty sure that that one was basically completely his fault.

Once he'd settled the unexpected, unpleasant fight with Ashley, Danny moved on to his other apologies. Eli sat across from him at breakfast in the dining hall and heard Danny out. He didn't put Danny out of his misery and let him off the hook when he started stumbling, but he did smile through it, and Danny figured that counted for something, even if shit was still kind of awkward on move-out day. They hugged, though, and Danny promised he’d keep an eye out for apartments while he was in the area and Eli was back home in Louisville over the summer.

They were taking everything down off their doors at the same time, and Eli spoke when Danny reached for his whiteboard. “You never erased the last one,” Eli said, and when Danny glanced over, he was smiling hesitantly.

“No way,” Danny said, “I love it, dude.” It wasn’t one of Eli’s most elaborate creations, just little cartoon versions of themselves waving at each other, but Danny wasn’t lying. It had been a reminder that Eli wasn’t irrevocably pissed at him; that he still wanted to draw stupid things on each others’ doors and yell at TV shows together and spend all-nighters kicking each other awake in the library.

When Danny got home to his parents’ house, one of the first things he did was put the whiteboard up on his bedroom door. It stayed there all summer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Dreaming 'bout the day when you wake up and find_   
>  _that what you're looking for has been here the whole time_

Sophomore year, Danny rented a room in a drafty old house on Breary Drive that had apparently been infamous for years among the neighbors for its rotating crew of college boy tenants.

Eli and four of his friends moved in next door, because it turned out that having a neighboring house full of baseball players who were known for throwing ragers really drove down the rent.

Danny was staring despairingly at his floor full of cardboard boxes when his phone buzzed with Eli telling him to look outside. He went to lean in the front window of his room. The street was quiet, aside from the moving van parked outside and three of his roommates yelling profane instructions at each other as they tried to figure out how to get somebody’s bed down off the truck.

His phone vibrated again in his hand. Eli had written, _ wrong window!!_

Danny laughed, a soft noise, and then crossed the room and peered out the other window.

Across the side yard, Eli waved from what was apparently his bedroom window. Danny slowly began to smile, and his smile only grew as Eli held up one finger to signal him to wait. He bent over something on his desk, then held up a piece of computer paper. It was a sign, _CHECK IT :)_ written in black Sharpie.

Danny couldn’t find any paper in the mess, so he scrawled _NOT BAD!_ on the side of a box and held it up to the window.

Eli laughed, hand pressed to his mouth, and scribbled something else down. The sign he held up this time said: _NEED A HAND?_

Danny nodded emphatically, hard enough that something in his neck cracked. Eli laughed again, pointed downward, and slipped out of view.

It was going to be a good year, Danny thought, and he went to go let Eli in.

* * *

“What if I was the first undecided to make it through four years without declaring a major?” Danny suggested. He was lying flat across his bed, facedown in his chem textbook, the air conditioner humming in the window. His bedroom wasn’t bad-looking, he thought, considering that he’d scrounged most of the furniture from his parents’ house and his brothers’ rejects, and everything on the walls had come from the local Goodwill. He and Eli had combed through a stack of old framed photos, strangers posing in military uniforms and clothes that looked straight out of _Mad Men_ , and Danny had claimed his favorites. 

“What a life plan,” said Eli, sitting at the foot of the bed with his back against the wall. He’d been quiet for a while so he was probably still reading. “Not-planning.” Danny hadn’t gotten a look at the cover of his book, but he would have been willing to bet it was another _Twilight_ thing; for at least three weeks straight over the summer, Danny had received texts about nothing but werewolves and vampires. 

Danny laughed. “Come on, we can’t all have found our calling.”

“Find me a paying job with benefits in film studies, and _then_ we can start referring to it as a calling.” A page turned.

Danny frowned at his textbook's page on polypeptides, then shoved himself up on one elbow and turned to look at Eli, who was, in fact, studiously reading one of the _Twilight_ books. “What’s up?”

One of the awesome things about Eli was that he didn’t try to bullshit. He just looked up from his book and said, “I don’t know, you don’t worry about what you’re going to do with your degree?”

“Not really,” Danny admitted. “I mean … we’re sophomores. I’m more worried about passing chemistry and figuring out my major.”

“Unbelievable,” said Eli, but he was smiling as he shook his head. “Okay, look—” He put _Eclipse_ down in his lap, using his knee to keep the spine cracked open. “You have _no_ idea what you might want to do?” He looked at Danny shrewdly.

Danny stared at his own arm for a couple seconds, then rolled over and sat up so he was facing Eli. “I’ve been thinking about the shrink I saw in middle school,” he admitted. “I liked talking to her and she made a huge difference in my life. She was an awesome lady.” He shrugged, suddenly feeling his neck prickle with exposure now that he'd said it all out loud. “And I like kids. I like the idea of helping people.”

“So … child psychology?” asked Eli. There wasn’t any judgment in his expression, which Danny appreciated.

“Maybe. Something like that. I don’t know; is that stupid?”

“ _Stupid_? Danny, that’s cool.” Eli was leaning forward over his knees, his eyes steadily on Danny. “I think you’d be great at something like that.”

“I mean, it’d mean med school and some intense shit,” said Danny, but even while he was thinking about the daunting prospect of _years_ more of school, it was impossible not to smile back at Eli.

“Are you sure? We should Google it; where’s your phone,” Eli said, already reaching over to the bedside table and digging around under their combined homework to come up with Danny’s iPhone.

“Where’s _your_ phone?” Danny asked, bemused, but Eli ignored him.

After a minute, Eli said, “Okay, so if you do psychiatry, you can prescribe medications but that requires med school and basically, like, nine years of extra school, but _psychology_ —” He glanced up from the phone. “Doctoral degree. Plus more training afterward, obviously, but!” He paused for a beat. “I mean, according to Wikipedia.”

“Huh,” said Danny, thoughtful, and then his phone rang. They both jumped.

Eli looked at him and Danny shrugged, so Eli held it to his ear and said lightly, “Hi, Danny’s phone.” He listened for a minute, his smile fading to what Danny thought was a general listening expression, then he said, “Hey, yeah, hang on.” He held the phone out. “Ashley.”

“Hey babe,” Danny said when he picked up, and before he entirely knew what was happening, he’d been sucked into a laughing disagreement over what time they’d said they were going to meet for dinner.

When he glanced up, he caught Eli shoving his feet into his sneakers, book tucked under his arm. “Hey,” Danny said, cutting Ashley off in the middle of a sentence.

“You guys are meeting soon anyway, and I’ve gotta go; places to go, readings to do,” Eli said, flashing him an easy wave, and then he was gone before Danny could protest.

“Danny?” asked Ashley.

“Sorry, sorry, yeah,” he said; “yeah, meet at six, right?”

* * *

For Halloween, Danny was a zombie, _Walking Dead_ -style, courtesy of Eli’s theater-major roommate and her deft hand with gray paint and fake skin. Ashley pronounced him perfectly disgusting when she came over before the party, even though Meredith hadn’t even finished the lower half of his face yet, and she sat on his desk, kicked her heels, and made fun of the iTunes playlist he was making.

“Ke$ha’s an American treasure,” he defended peaceably. “When the party’s at _your_ house, we’ll listen to nothing but Arcade Fire and Wilco Milk Hotel.” 

She cracked up into her hands. “Neutral Milk Hotel, Danny.”

Ash had a very specific list of what was legitimately good music and what should really be appreciated ironically, and the “good music” list pretty much began and ended with a couple of bands Danny had never heard of before he met her. He tended to get them confused. “I was close!” he said, and she laughed again and leaned forward and craned her neck to get a look at the computer screen. 

“Black Eyed Peas, huh?” She sat back, grinning at him. “Very nice; very zeitgeisty.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Danny mumbled.

“It’s a great playlist,” she promised. She tugged down the hem of the shirt she was wearing as part of her “zom-bee” costume — a yellow t-shirt with a few bands of black electrical tape stuck to it. She’d promised to add fake blood and a headband with antennae later. It was cute (Ash was always cute), even if it hadn’t involved a ton of effort and wasn’t what Danny had expected when she’d volunteered to be a zombie with him.

“I fully support your dedication t—” Paper crinkled as Ashley shifted her weight, and she stopped short and pulled an old sign out from under her thigh. “What’s this?”

“I was talking to Eli earlier,” Danny said absently, staring at the email that Shortstop Sean had sent with his demands for the party playlist. That was a lot of heavy metal.

“Though … paper?”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing up in time to see her quizzical face. He leaned over and grabbed a sign that said _LOOKING GOOD!_ He illustratively held it up in the direction of the window, the way he would if Eli was in his room. It didn't look like he was there now.

“Wow,” Ashley said, after a minute. “You can see right in here, can’t you?” She pawed lightly through Danny's half of the conversation that he and Eli had had that morning about Meredith's makeup work on both of them. “Why don’t you just text him?”

“I don’t know.” Danny shrugged. He dragged Pitbull’s latest single onto the playlist, then followed it up with a metal cover of “Monster Mash” that would hopefully make Sean happy. “This is more fun.”

Ashley was quiet. He was vaguely aware of her glancing toward the window, her hair swinging with the movement. When he looked up, though, she was smiling at him. She playfully prodded his knee with her toes. “Listen, Mr. DJ, are you almost done there or what?”

“Just about,” he said, recognizing the flirty tone and starting to grin. He tilted his face up at her. “Why?”

“You’re getting mouth makeup put on later, right? So if there’s anything you want to _use_ your mouth for...” She slid off the desk and grabbed both sides of his hoodie to pull him up out of his chair and then back with her a few steps. She was silhouetted by light from the window behind her, smiling. “...You should probably do it now.”

“Mer’s gonna kill me if we smudge anything,” he said, grinning against her mouth as he settled his hands on her waist.

“I can be careful,” Ashley murmured, pulling him in closer, and she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him in the weak warmth of the fading sunlight.

Meredith did yell when she saw the state of the airbrushing she'd done on the back of Danny's neck, but it was both worth it and easily fixed. Besides — Eli smudged _his_ makeup even worse while grinding with a buddy of Shortstop Sean's later that night, so at least Danny wasn't the most scandalous student in the class.

Danny watched them dance for a couple seconds, Eli laughing and Sean’s friend grinning at him. Eli and Meredith had come to the party as a matched pair, an elaborate system of exaggerated dots and bold lines painted across their faces and hands to make them look like a couple from a Roy Lichtenstein comic. Meredith was nowhere to be seen now and Sean’s friend was smearing Eli's face dots with his cheek; the black lines outlining Eli’s mouth were clearly going to be in jeopardy within the next few minutes. 

Danny turned and squeezed through the crowd to check on how much beer they had left in the kitchen.

* * *

In November, Danny finally realized that his girlfriend and his best friend kind of hated each other.

It wasn't anything dramatic. If anything, it was a small straw that broke the camel's back; the last in a long, slow parade of missed signs. Ashley was invited to the sideshow of turkey and football and beer that was Francis Family Thanksgiving, and when Mom casually asked Danny about Eli's plans for the break, Danny saw the look on Ashley's face, and suddenly, the dots began to connect.

He confronted Eli first.

Eli froze like a deer in headlights at the question, and then he said, "Um, no, not at all, God; we've never argued or anything. I don't know. I guess we got to know each other better and we're just not each others' favorite people."

“It's fine,” said Ashley, with an expression that confused him, equal parts kind and sharp. “Sometimes people just don’t click, Danny.”

* * *

In December, Danny's house participated in the neighborhood-wide unofficial Christmas light contest. Adam almost fell off the roof, and Joaquín and Outfielder Shawn came to blows over the correct placement for Santa's sleigh, but overall, Danny felt, theirs was a respectable entry.

"Wow," Eli's roommate Jackson said, standing in a huddle in the middle of the street with everyone from both their houses. "I think I might actually need sunglasses."

Both houses were a riot of color and motion, dripping with colored lights and lit-up figurines. Danny's house had purple icicle lights lining the eaves, half a blue tree, Santa on the roof, and a crooked row of candy canes, but Eli's house had a nativity scene made up of glowing Winnie the Pooh figurines wearing Santa hats. It was tough to call.

They all stood in respectful silence.

"We did it, kids." Eli tapped his mug of hot chocolate against his roommate Allison's. "This is officially the crowning achievement of my academic year." It easily could have been a snide comment, but it wasn't, Danny could tell; Eli was smiling helplessly at their masterpieces, his face aglow. He looked like he was ready to drop into the dirty snow in his front yard and start rolling around with delight. Danny couldn't stop looking at him.

"It's beautiful," Allison breathed, awestruck, and everybody standing in the street was quiet again.

Shortstop Sean killed the moment. "Next year, we go bigger!!" he yelled, to a general round of cheers and bro-fists.

Danny wrapped his arm around Ashley's shoulder and she curled into his side. "Pretty amazing, right?" he said, grinning.

"Yeah." Ashley sounded kind of flat. When he glanced down, she looked back up at him and lowered her voice so nobody else could hear. "I don't really get it," she admitted. She shivered against him and drew her shoulders in tighter. "I know you guys worked really hard, though!"

"Oh," said Danny, looking back at the brightly-lit houses. Slowly: "I guess it _is_ a little goofy."

"Just a little," Ashley told him, and he thought, in surprise, that her smile was kind of condescending.

* * *

It got hard, after that.

* * *

Over spring break, Ashley went home while Danny stayed on campus for baseball practices, which gave Danny a lot of time to think. Ashley was brilliant and slyly funny, sharp-tongued and gorgeous, and Danny loved her, but he could feel a decision loom closer every time that he said something hasty and she stared at him like he had a second head, or she made a casual remark about someone that made a kernel of discomfort curl up tighter in his chest.

Eli didn't go home either, working on his summer internship applications, and as much as Danny didn't want him to be, he knew Eli was a problem, or maybe a part of the problem. Maybe a week apart would be the best thing for them, too, even just five feet and two walls apart.

Danny pulled the shade in his window.

When one of Eli's roommates texted from her visit home to ask if Eli was answering his phone, Danny had to admit that he hadn't spoken to him in three or four days. Meredith told Danny where to find his head (his ass), and then where to find the spare key. He discovered Eli sitting on the kitchen floor with his face pressed against the refrigerator, and he lifted him to his feet, dragged him to the couch, and spent two days nursing him through what Eli named "the death plague" when he was with-it enough to understand what was happening around him.

Danny pressed his hand to Eli's hot forehead and brushed his fingers through his hair, careful not to wake him, and he let himself think about what it would be like if he could do this while Eli was awake and well.

Eli started feeling better on the night of Adam’s birthday party. With repeated assurances that Eli was going to be fine and would text if he had any problems and _seriously, Danny, go to the fucking party_ , Danny went home and got drunker than he’d ever been in his life.

When he staggered up to his room, he saw Eli’s light on. With a massive amount of effort, Danny texted _WINDWO NOW_ , and after a minute, Eli stuck his head out of the blanket-burrito in his bed and peered out the window.

Texting was technically faster, but hand-writing was easier. It required less dexterity. Danny held up his sign. _FEELING ___?? ______

Eli smiled and leaned over the edge of his bed for a pad of paper and a pen, then, after a moment spent writing, shoved a new sign up. _FEELING __ BETTER__!_ Then he raised a second one. _I HAD A RAD NURSE._

_CALL ME DANNY: NURSE DANNY_

_DO YOU NEED A NURSE?_ Eli’s sign asked, and he was laughing as he held it up.

_I’M GR8_

_YOU’RE GR9!!!!_ Eli retorted, and then they had a combined fit of stupid laughter. Eli’s half of it was probably more legit, considering that he’d had a fever for a day and Danny had just done four of Joaquín’s heinous test tube shots, but Danny didn’t care. He was warm and laughing and looking across at his best friend, who was grinning at him like he’d hung the moon and was so funny and caring and got him, got everything. 

Danny wrote another sign. He looked down at it when he was done and his shaky scrawl swam in front of his eyes. He put down the Sharpie, and he wasn’t sure whether the sudden rise of nausea could be pinned on Sharpie fumes or on Joaquín’s devil mixology.

Danny couldn’t lift that sign.

He wrote a replacement, one that said _SLEEP!!!!!_ , and held it up to Eli’s inquisitive look. He pointed fiercely just for good measure. Eli smiled and saluted him, and then staggered out of bed to draw his blinds.

Danny found the night’s signs scattered across his desk when he woke up in the morning feeling like actual death warmed over. He automatically glanced toward Eli’s house and saw the blinds still down in Eli’s room, but a sign taped to the inside of the window. It said: _DANNY, DRINK WATER_.

Danny scrubbed his face with his hands and cleaned off his desk, but he hesitated over the last sign. He flicked the edges; traced the letters with a slow finger. Eventually, instead of sweeping it into the trash with the rest, he folded it up and shoved it in his desk drawer.

* * *

In April, Ashley broke up with Danny. Or Danny broke up with Ashley; it happened so suddenly, at the edge of the baseball field, that it was hard to say which.

Danny thought they were going to like each other a lot more when they weren’t trying to love each other.

In May, Danny tore through his desk searching for his watch, and he found something better. 

He’d know the moment when he saw it, he thought. 

He carried the sign in his wallet for two weeks, and in the end, Eli picked the moment.

* * *

On Friday night, wearing the ill-fitting tuxedo jacket that he found on the $5 rack at Goodwill, Danny holds up the sign that says ' _I LOVE YOU._ ' 

Eli stares at the sign until Danny lifts his chin with two fingers. When they make eye contact, his smile is so stunned and so dazzling that Danny feels like he might actually fall over. He sways in a step and Eli sways back toward him. Danny raises his eyebrows, his heart thundering. Eli nods, still smiling like nothing Danny has ever seen, and it’s impossible to say who leans in first. Their noses collide, but Danny tilts his head and — there. Right there. It's a kiss for the motherfucking ages.

It's PG at most — Danny’s R-rated, fist-pumping inner monologue notwithstanding — but it lingers, Danny feeling almost drunk with the warm press of Eli’s mouth. Eli reaches out and grabs the lapel of Danny’s jacket, fabric and paper crinkling under his tight grip, and they kiss and kiss.

They have to take a break when they’re both starting to smile too hard to continue. Danny can feel himself grinning so hugely that his cheeks hurt. Eli’s whole face has lit up; Danny has never seen him like this. He reaches up and slides Eli’s glasses back on his nose as carefully as he took them off, though it’s harder this time because his hand isn’t entirely steady. Something in Eli’s expression goes achingly soft. 

"I'm really glad you changed your mind about studying," Danny finally says, his voice low, and Eli cracks a silent laugh, his face shining.

* * *

In September 2012, Danny goes to his millionth Cubs game (it's a rough estimate); Eli goes to his first.

After the loss in the ninth, they fight their way through the throngs trying to leave Wrigley Field. Eli grabs Danny's hand and clutches it like a lifeline, occasionally calling, "Left! Left!" or "Right!" from where he's being towed along behind him. They realized over the summer that Eli's now the barest eighth of an inch taller than Danny, and Eli still thinks it's hilarious to do stuff like pretend he can see over a crowd when Danny can't.

They pull up short, along with at least 40 or 50 other people, to wait at a crosswalk just outside the entrance to the stadium. Traffic buzzes past at ridiculous speeds. It's going to be hot as hell once they get out on the street again, but for now, they're waiting in the shade provided by the overhang. "How ya doing down there, scamp?" Eli asks condescendingly, and then he squawks and tries to duck away while Danny pushes his brand-new baseball cap down over his face. Eli's escape attempts don't get him very far, given that he's laughing and they're still holding hands.

"Okay! God!" Eli says, finally, the bill of his cap shoved so low that the only visible part of his face is his chin. "I get it! I'll stop the short jokes! Do people still say uncle?"

Danny grins and readjusts the hat for him. Eli wiggles his eyebrows at him when his line of sight is clear again. "You do," Danny says; "that's enough for me."

"I see you trying to butter me up so that I'll announce that you've successfully converted me to baseball-freak status," says Eli. "It's working." He shoots Danny a flash of a teasing smile.

Danny knows that, all joking aside, it isn't working. They've known each other for a long time now, and Eli just isn't a baseball guy. But that's the thing about Eli — he may not get baseball, but he gets what it means to Danny. So he kept score in the program they bought, because he's a nerd for statistics, and he spent a half an hour deciding on a hat in the souvenir shop, and he almost hit Danny in the face with a hot dog in genuine excitement when Soriano hit a long drive that looked like it might go out of the park.

Danny smiles at Eli, throat tight with warmth. Eli's return smile softens at whatever he sees in Danny's expression. He squeezes Danny's hand. His skin is already going sticky in the heat, but Danny just holds on harder.

Danny clears his throat and says, "Speaking of working..." He reaches over with his free hand and uses two fingers to tap the brim of Eli's Cubs hat.

It takes Eli a second but then he brays a startled laugh. "Oh my God, this is totally doing it for you, isn't it?" 

As the stoplight changes and the crowd around them prepares to cross the street, Danny admits, "It really is."

"I can work with that," Eli says, still grinning at him, and Danny's laughing as they dash out into the sunshine.


End file.
